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~~ ~~ ~~ The Myth of the Moral Majority
Here's the church. Here's the steeple. Open the doors and—hey, where did all the evangelicals go?"
Debra Dickerson"
May 01"2008"
Listen to the interview with Debra Dickerson
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http://www.motherjones.com/arts/feature/2008/05/the-myth-of-the-moral-majority.html

This february, the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life released the most comprehensive of its surveys of the "religious landscape" of the United States. Front and center was the finding that 26 percent of American adults—around 54 million—are evangelical Protestants. The idea that 1 in every 4 of us thumps a Bible only confirmed what many had assumed to be gospel since 2000, when evangelical voters were credited with winning the White House for George W. Bush and the media began its grand genuflections toward a resurgent fundamentalism, casting evangelicals (and more broadly, "values voters") as a politicized wedge that politicians ignored at their peril.

And who could blame them? Not only are evangelicals supposedly our biggest religious voting bloc, but Pew reports that nearly 80 percent of Americans are Christian, and 40 percent attend church weekly according to Gallup Polls. But what if those numbers—and everything we've assumed they tell us about the power of the religious right—are wildly wrong?

Take that 40 percent church attendance stat. Looking around her half-empty Southern Baptist church outside Dallas, Christine Wicker had her doubts. Wicker, a veteran Texas newspaper reporter, was born again when she was nine but drifted away from her evangelical roots in adulthood. A few years ago, she returned to the Southern Baptist Church to both renew her faith and write The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, an insider's look at evangelicals' power, wading in where secular journalists feared to tread. When she started looking into the numbers on church attendance, she found that researchers could vouch for only 18 percent of Americans being regular churchgoers—less than half the accepted figure. That led her to wonder about the already widely reported claim that 25 percent of Americans are evangelicals; could the real number also be less than half that?

In size, only the Catholic Church dwarfs the Southern Baptist Church, the biggest evangelical denomination and by far the most organized and fastidious of the Protestant record keepers. But Wicker discovered that the numbers the Southern Baptist Convention (sbc) releases for public consumption tell a much different story than the ones it uses internally. The organization claims 16 million members, but as one reverend cracks, "the fbi couldn't find half of [them] if they had to." A 2006 sbc report states that only 11 million of its members live in the same area as their home church anymore; that number includes those who've been double- or even triple-counted elsewhere. It also includes perennial no-shows and those who attend services at "bedside Baptist" (they sleep in on Sunday but show up for Easter and Christmas). And that's not to mention those who've lost their religion or converted to another faith. If their names were ever on "the roll" at a Baptist church, they're probably inscribed there for life.

With more digging, Wicker came across a 2007 sbc report that found only 5.4 million adults attended services regularly enough to be considered church members. Further complicating matters, many of those who regularly filled the pews weren't official members, and, most significantly, 1 in 8 wasn't saved or born again. Factoring all this in, Wicker calculated that there are fewer than 4 million devoted Southern Baptists. Her math seems to be backed up by collection-plate totals: If the church truly has 16 million members, then they contributed a miserly $3.50 each to a nationwide fundraising campaign last year.

And it's not just the Southern Baptists who appear to be playing number games. The National Association of Evangelicals, an umbrella group that does not include the sbc, claimed 30 million members on its website. When Wicker contacted the association for comment, the figure changed to 4.5 million. No one there could—or would—explain the sudden 85 percent drop in believers. (However, the group's website currently describes its lobbying arm as the voice of "30 million Americans united under a common banner.")

The emperor's-new-clothes flimsiness of these widely accepted exaggerated numbers says much about the cold calculation of far-right religious leaders. Moral Majority and Focus on the Family have happily staked their clout on coreligionists who never knew they were being counted—often twice or three times—among the faithful for political ends. "The idea that evangelicals are taking over America is one of the greatest publicity scams in history," Wicker concludes, "a perfect coup accomplished by savvy politicos and religious leaders, who understand media weaknesses and exploit them brilliantly."

Though she doesn't delve into those weaknesses, Wicker's findings speak volumes about the limitations of a Fourth Estate that accepted and uncritically deferred to the power of the religious right. Having been handed a ready-made story line by the thou-shalt-not brigades, the media became transfixed by a phenomenon they couldn't fully fathom but felt bound to report on. Those unexamined numbers and claims of followers in theological lockstep launched a thousand cover stories and columns—rarely prompting questions about what a term as broad as "evangelical" really meant on the ground. Whether they viewed it as a new political reality, a megatrend, or a bogeyman, the media embraced the idea of a reenergized, monolithic Christianity and faithfully chronicled something that didn't exist.

Part of the problem is that the national-level journalists who control the discourse tend not to be, nor have they ever been, committed religionists as adults. Newsrooms are determinedly secular, and self-consciously so. Afraid of being tagged as godless liberals, most journalists would never dream of calling BS on believers. Which may explain why Wicker's book could only have been written by a born-and-bred Baptist.

Innumeracy and gutlessness aside, why did we never ask ourselves if the label "evangelical" tells us anything more than the yarmulke or the head scarf on the person next to us at Starbucks? To assume that evangelicals overwhelmingly oppose divorce, abortion, and gay rights; that they believe in school prayer and intelligent design; and that they're overwhelmingly politicized is a gross oversimplification that evangelicals themselves ought to find disquieting. As Wicker suggests, perhaps one's answer to the drone who interrupts dinner to ask your "religious preference" is more reflex than exit poll.

Wicker finds that many of the most active believers belong to both a small "home" church and a megachurch where they "vacation." And as the most recent Pew study shows, 44 percent of Americans say they have switched their religious affiliation or moved between periods of declaring a faith and religious free agency. Religious identity, it turns out, is as fluid as any other.

It is with believable regret that Wicker pulls the threadbare rug out from under the "powerful" Christian far right. "Just as I had finished convincing myself that the evangelical church was smarter and had more to offer than ever—I'm still convinced of that—I was hit with the growing suspicion that the entire faith might be sinking fast," she writes.

She's probably right that old-school fundamentalism is going the way of the dinosaurs. The Southern Baptist Church's much-publicized effort to baptize a million souls in 2006 was a dismal failure; only one-third of that number "bathed in Jordan's water." According to George Barna, an independent evangelical researcher who tracks spiritual trends, 20 million born-again Christians are moving beyond formal churchgoing, meeting in small groups, often in each other's homes. He predicts that by 2025, local churches will have lost half of their current "market share." No doubt many of those leaving the church find fire and brimstone as anathema as any liberal but still believe that there is a living God who loves them.

If there are as few evangelicals as Wicker claims, can we ink-stained wretches go back to ignoring them? Not so fast. Religion will always be of more cultural significance than the mere number of its adherents, especially as the United States becomes ever more diverse and other religious traditions clamor to be heard. We will have to go on respecting Christianity and deferring to its oversize voice in public affairs if only because all those bedside Baptists might just stop sleeping in on Sunday if the beliefs they rarely dust off suddenly come under attack.

Still, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation makes plain that the media must be doggedly skeptical whenever faith-based constituencies claim their place in the public square. Maybe all us godless liberal journalists need to get religion about confronting America's most sacred cow.

Debra J. Dickerson, a self-described "millionth generation Southern Baptist," blogs at motherjones.com.
This article has been made possible by the Foundation for National Progress, the Investigative Fund of Mother Jones, and, .....
© 2008" The Foundation for National Progress ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ .

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"The necessity of the times, more than ever, calls for our utmost circumspection, deliberation, fortitude, and perseverance. Let us remember that `if we suffer tamely a lawless attack upon our liberty, we encourage it, and involve others in our doom.' it is a very serious consideration...that millions yet unborn may be the miserable sharers of the event."

Samuel Adams
Speech in Boston, 1771.
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"I am done with great things and big things, great institutions and big success, and I am for those tiny invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, yet which if you give them time, will rend the hardest monuments of man's pride"

William James
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'The evils of government are directly proportional to the tolerance of the people"

Frank Kent
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"Freedom had been hunted round the globe; reason was considered as rebellion; and the slavery of fear had made men afraid to think. But such is the irresistible nature of truth, that all it asks, and all it wants, is the liberty of appearing"

Thomas Paine
Rights of Man, 1791

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Propagandists First,
Journalists Second
How the New York Times Won 2004 for Bush
By
Ted Rall

21/05/08 "ICH" -- -- Should the news media be patriotic? When a journalist uncovers a government secret, which comes first–national security or the public’s right to know?

In the United States, reporters consider themselves Americans first, journalists second. That means consulting the government before going public with a state secret. “When I was at ABC,” James Bamford told Time in 2006, “we always checked with the Administration in power when we thought we had something of concern, and there was usually some way to work it out.”

In a new book about the Bush Administration’s efforts to expand the president’s powers at the expense of the legislative and judicial branches, the assumption that the press shouldn’t publish security-sensitive stories is so hard-wired that New York Times reporter Eric Lichtblau accepts it as a given. But it’s a very American concept, and one that relies on the presumption that the U.S. government may make mistakes, but is largely a force for good. In other countries, the relationship between rulers and the press is strictly adversarial.

In “Bush’s Law: The Remaking of American Justice” Lichtblau unwittingly relates a depressing parable–his seeming obliviousness to conflict of interest is a bummer–describing the nation’s most prominent newspaper’s willingness to keep secrets for government officials, who turn out to be (shocker alert·) lying. It’s a cautionary tale about journalistic nationalism, one of many (Judith Miller, anyone?) in which the Times transformed itself into Bush’s political slut.

A whore, at least, would have demanded money.

In 2004 Lichtblau and fellow Times reporter Jim Risen learned that the National Security Agency was spying domestically, on American citizens. The NSA, which uses sophisticated voice-recognition software and computer programs to intercept phone calls, fax transmissions, e-mail and even bank wire transfers, was supposed to limit its activities to foreign countries. Illegally expanding beyond its Congressionally-authorized mandate, Lichtblau writes, “the NSA had essentially gained access to the biggest telecom ’switches’ in the country, using the agency’s data-mining technology to comb the huge trunks carrying massive volumes of traffic, in order to zero in on suspected dirty numbers and eavesdrop on them without warrants.”

It was a big story. Or it would have been, had the newspaper chosen to run it when it learned of it.

Naturally, it triggered alarms in official Washington when another Times reporter called the NSA for comment. Soon the agency’s director, General Michael Hayden, was calling the Times, asking it to censor itself. “Don’t run this story,” Administration honchos begged.

“The Times,” Lichtblau says, “had been through many contretemps in its long history over whether or not to publish newsworthy stories involving sensitive national security information and, despite the vitriolic charges from its critics, it was never a decision the paper made with reckless abandon. In more than a few cases, it has decided not to publish anything at all.”

Suckers.

For over a year, Lichtblau explains in an apparent attempt to justify himself and his employer to conservative critics, Times editors and reporters met repeatedly with White House officials to ask them why they shouldn’t spill the beans on the NSA’s domestic spying operation. That the program was illegal was pretty obvious. (Congress acknowledged as much by later voting to retroactively legalize it.) So was the lameness of the government’s argument against making the NSA’s activities public.

Declaring the Bush Administration “unpersuasive,” Lichtblau said: “To me, it was never clear what Osama bin Laden and his henchmen would learn–confirming, really–that the United States spy services were listening to them.” But the White House kept calling meetings, playing for time. Meanwhile, every morning, the Times came out without important news that its readers would care about–that their phone calls and e-mails were being monitored.

“Bush and ten senior advisors in the White House and the intelligence community would make personal pleas not to run the story in a series of meetings spanning 14 months, beginning in October of 2004 weeks before the presidential election,” Lichtblau says.

Weeks before the presidential election. You’d think the timing of the Administration’s pleas for self-censorship might have tipped off the Times‘ editors that they were being used in order to ensure that Bush and the Republican Party won the election. Moreover, Lichtblau wrote, “We had reason to suspect that the White House was actively misleading us and that its impassioned pleas might have less to do with concern over national security harm than with the legal and political fallout that the story might trigger.” Gee, you think? And yet the paper’s editors refused to print it.

The Bush Administration, he argues, “had not yet suffered the kind of crippling body blows to its credibility that it would .” Yeah, well, not really.

Remember, this was late 2004. The U.S. had invaded Iraq in March 2003, a year and a half earlier, but the WMDs had never turned up. The paper’s own editorial page had been ranting on and on about the Administration’s perfidy. Credibility? What credibility? Besides, it wasn’t as if Bush was the first First Fibber. All presidents are serial liars. So are their subordinates. Why would the Times, or anyone else, believe them about anything?

By then, of course, Bush had won a second term. To some extent, he owed his victory to the “liberal” New York Times more than to Karl Rove. The Times, Extra! Magazine reported later, had also sat on another late-breaking “October Surprise” story that might have caused enough voters to change their minds to vote for Democrat John Kerry in 2004. That suspicious rectangular bulge in Bush’s jacket during his debate with Kerry, a NASA scientist who is an expert on such things had told the Times, was indeed an electronic transmitter that allowed Bush to receive remote coaching from Rove or someone else.

“A Times journalist, who said that Times staffers were ‘pretty upset’ about the killing of the story, claims the senior editors felt was ‘too close’ to the election to run such a piece,” reported Extra!.

The government doesn’t tell the truth to reporters, even on “background.” Why shouldn’t the media tell the truth to the American people?

[B]Ted Rall is the author of the new book “Silk Road to Ruin: Is Central Asia the New Middle East?,” an in-depth prose and graphic novel analysis of America’s next big foreign policy challenge. www.tedrall.com

© 2008 Ted Rall
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Famous Are the Flowers: Hawaiian Resistance Then--and Now
By Elinor Langer
This article appeared in the April 28, 2008 edition of The Nation.

April 8, 2008

Initial research for this Special Issue was funded by The Nation Institute.

What seems like many years ago, on a family trip to Māui, I suddenly realized that Hawai'i was not what it seemed to be. We were driving through Lāhainā toward a near-in coastal reef when it came to me that what I saw was not fitting together. Makai--as the Hawaiians say, toward the sea--was a crowded tourist town filled with restaurants, trinket shops and alluring kiosks where tour guides offering commercial adventures of every description plied their wares. Mauka--toward the mountains--was a crumbling sugar mill about which the question that sprang to mind was not so much what had happened there in earlier times but how on earth it was standing now. Up the hill, I knew, was the building known as Hale Pa'i, which had housed the first missionary press, and at the very top, Lāhaināluna, the original missionary school from which the first generation of seminary-trained Hawaiians had gone out to spread the language and the Word. On my lap as we drove was a guidebook to Māui I had been reading the night before and was leafing through again that said, in spirit if not in so many words, In 1893, a group of sugar planters and other businessmen, some of whom were descendants of the missionaries, overthrew the Queen and they all lived happily ever after. At which point a voice in my head involuntarily said, "No way!"

At the time this was no more than the passing thought of a leftish tourist who had no wish to subtract yet another beautiful spot from the list of places it was possible to go in the world without discomfort, but the thought stuck. At home, I bought Queen Lili'uokalani's autobiography, Hawaii's Story by Hawaii's Queen, which--surprise--did not agree with the author of the guidebook, and a few other volumes, but I soon put them aside. I was writing about another subject, and I did not have the time. Over a decade later, when I returned to those books, I found them astonishing, for the history they told of the destruction of the independent Kingdom of Hawai'i largely by American businessmen in Honolulu with the support of American troops, and its annexation five years later not by treaty but by mere Congressional resolution, was a history I had never been taught. Nor had I been taught the history of the years before, when between the coming of Captain Cook in 1778 and the coming of the missionaries in 1820 the native population declined from perhaps 800,000 to about 135,000 from foreign diseases, nor the decline that continued inexorably year after year so that by the time of annexation in 1898 it was under 40,000, with many observers predicting, and indeed treating it as a convenience, that there would soon be none.

Yet what might be the point of this belated historical excursion was an open question. For one thing, it was over. That was then. However things might have been in the days when, as a 1941 picture book put it, "Hawaiians owned and operated Hawaii," Hawai'i now was a state, officially owned and operated by the USA, in particular by the US military, which controlled 22.4 percent of the island of O'ahu and 5.7 percent of the land of the islands as a whole. About 7 million tourists a year visited the place, the majority Americans, enjoying not just the sun and sea but that ideal ratio of the exotic and the familiar not possible elsewhere around the globe, where America owned only a partial share. As for that bane of American history--race--with its mixture of people in some cases dating back to before the islands were on any map, the Hawai'i fondue was the richest blend in the world. Walking the streets of Honolulu or elsewhere you would need a racial Geiger counter to figure out who was what. The political implications, too, seemed almost stale. With so many more recent examples to choose from, who needs to cluck over nineteenth-century Hawai'i, merely the first of many places beyond our shorelines where an independent people in the way of American imperialism met their fate?

The more I immersed myself in the story of Hawai'i, however, the more I saw that what was so compelling about it was not that these issues were settled but that they were not. In January 1993, on the centennial of the overthrow, the state sponsored an immense day-by-day re-enactment of its events so authentic that when the actress playing the Queen returned to the 'Iolani Palace from a meeting with her cabinet ministers across the street to tell the people that her efforts to restore certain rights to the native population via a new Constitution would have to be postponed, many in the audience instinctively held their hats to their chests. Two days later, when a well-known nationalist of the present delivered the cry of a well-known royalist of the past--"We must stand together.... We love our Kingdom! We love our Queen! We love the land that gave us birth!"--the audience cheered and wept. That summer an international tribunal convened by sovereignty activists with judges from several countries took testimony throughout the islands, documenting many aspects of the US-Hawai'i relationship as violations of international law. Five years later, on the anniversary of formal annexation, when newly found petitions against it signed by about 38,000 of the 40,000 Native Hawaiians alive in 1898 were displayed in a tent outside the Bishop Museum and people found the signatures of their grandparents, whose stands against the American colossus had been in the category of dangerous family secrets, they wept again. This awareness of history has only deepened with time. Start a conversation with almost anyone on a park bench or bus, and you are likely to find not only a genealogist but a historian, eager to tell you of his or her personal experiences and also the tales passed on by the uncle of an uncle of an uncle of an uncle from the time of Kamehameha the Great who knew just where the king had injured his ankle when he was a boy. What is true of random Hawaiians is also true of random haoles, many of whom have shared in the reconsideration of history and have taken the causes of their Native Hawaiian neighbors to heart.

So much feeling in the streets was bound to have reverberations in Washington. With Hawai'i an inextricable part of the US economy and the islands the headquarters of the military's vital Pacific Command, whose jurisdiction covers more than half the surface of the earth, it would not do to have restless natives. On November 23, 1993--a few months after telling an eager throng on Waīkikī Beach, "You will not be forgotten"--President Clinton signed Public Law 103-150, known as the Apology Resolution, to "acknowledge" the 100th anniversary of the January 17, 1893, overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawai'i and to offer an apology to Native Hawaiians on behalf of the United States. A poignant thirty-seven-clause review of the history of the islands, the Apology Resolution may be one of the most empathetic documents ever to emanate from Washington [see box, page 17]. Its implications were barely noticed until later. Intended by the senators from Hawai'i who sponsored it simply to register the injustices of the past without pointing to any remedies in the future, the resolution implicitly raised a follow-up question: what do you do after you say you're sorry? In the words of one of the handful of other senators who took it seriously enough to say anything at all, "the logical consequences of this resolution would be independence."

II

On March 29, 1893, two months after the overthrow of Queen Lili'uokalani and only a few weeks after the second inauguration of Democratic President Grover Cleveland, whose first term had been followed by the presidency of Benjamin Harrison, a Republican, there arrived in Honolulu a courtly, silver-haired gentleman named James Blount, sent by the new President to find out what had really happened in the islands. The political circumstances of Blount's mission were these. Two days after the overthrow, representatives of the self-appointed Provisional Government--essentially the leaders of a longstanding movement for annexation in a new guise--had set off for Washington carrying with them a well-developed petition for annexation to the United States, which they had every reason to believe would be warmly welcomed, but not carrying the representatives of the Kingdom, who were forced to wait for the next crossing, several weeks later, to present their case. Annexation was a cherished ambition of many prominent Republicans, in particular Benjamin Harrison's expansionist Secretary of State, James Blaine, a long-term associate of the American minister to Hawai'i, John Stevens. The American minister, it would turn out, had not only, on his own initiative, recognized the Provisional Government even before it was in full possession of the buildings traditionally considered to warrant such recognition, but had conspired with its leading members beforehand to encourage their revolutionary plans. Barely a month after the first outlines of the American-led revolt had stirred Honolulu and with only seventeen days of the Republican Administration left to go, on February 15 a treaty of annexation was whisked before the US Senate for ratification. Democrat Cleveland was appalled. If the United States was to depart "from unbroken American tradition in providing for the addition to our territory of islands of the sea more than two thousand miles removed from our nearest coast [the] transaction should be clear and free from suspicion," the President told Congress later. Five days after taking the oath of office, on March 9, 1893, Cleveland withdrew the treaty from the Senate for "re-examination." Two days later, he summoned Blount.

The Blount Report would be a remarkable government document in any era. A 1,400-page model of open diplomacy, it contains what appears to be the entire diplomatic correspondence between the Hawaiian Kingdom and the United States from the 1820s on, including communications between the State Department and its ministers in Honolulu of a sort that would never be published today, transcripts of Blount's interviews with the principals, analyses of the Kingdom's successive Constitutions, learned articles of the period on important aspects of Hawaiian life from health to population, newspaper reports, public speeches, budgets, sugar export statistics, stockholder data for the leading corporations--in short, everything an independent observer would need to arrive at an opinion about what had taken place and why. It is a primary source for understanding the events of the Hawaiian revolution even today. Its moral heft is no less impressive than its physical heft. "Colonel" Blount was nobody's pawn. A former Confederate officer, he had endured the Yankee occupation of his hometown of Macon, Georgia, after the Civil War and the lesser indignities that came from representing it in Congress for twenty years after Georgia was readmitted to the Union, rising to become the chair of the House Foreign Relations Committee before he retired. Thinking that Blount was a friend, but not taking chances, the leaders of the Provisional Government and Minister Stevens were unpleasantly surprised when they rowed out to greet his vessel with the news that they had already rented him, as he would report, a "house, well furnished [with servants and a carriage and horses]...[for which] I could pay...just what I chose, from nothing up," and he declined. He also declined the Queen's offer of a mere carriage ride into the city. Sensing at once that "with the minds of Hawaiian citizens...full of uncertainty as to what the presence of American troops, the American flag, and the American protectorate implied" no one would speak with him freely, he had the flag hauled down and the troops returned to their ships, not dissuaded even by an urgent visit from Stevens and one of the annexationists who informed him with "intense gravity...that he knew beyond doubt...that if the flag and troops were removed" troops from a Japanese ship in the harbor would rush in to restore the Queen. "I was not impressed much with these statements," Blount noted wryly in his opening paragraphs. Details dispensed with, he set to work.

The heart of the Blount Report is a lucid and often droll thirty-nine-page, first-person narrative addressed to Cleveland's Secretary of State, W.Q. Gresham, describing some of his encounters and his conclusions. Whether it was his character, his experience or simply his chosen position outside the literally interrelated circles of power in Honolulu, this well-seasoned Southerner seems to have been as immune to rhetoric as he was to manipulation, particularly rhetoric draping racial and economic issues in the plumage of democracy. What Blount told Washington, in brief, was (1) the pretense of the new leaders that it was the Queen's moving to change the Constitution (the alleged "cause" of the coup) rather than their dethroning her that was illegal overlooked the racial truth that the Constitution she was trying to change was the one forced on her predecessor six years before for the very purpose of shifting power from the native monarchy to the white elite; (2) "the controlling element in the white population is connected with the sugar industry.... Annexation has for its charm the complete abolition of all duties on...exports to the United States"; (3) American diplomatic and military resources were strongly implicated in the coup; and (4) the natives didn't want it. "The testimony [even] of leading annexationists is that if the question of annexation was submitted to a popular vote... would be defeated," he wrote.

The Blount Report's unsparing assessment of the US role in the overthrow was far from universally welcomed. Submitted to Congress by Cleveland in a lengthy message of December 18, 1893, in which he described the coup as "an act of war... [against] the Government of a feeble but friendly and confiding people...which a due regard for our national character as well as the rights of the injured people requires we should endeavor to repair"--words the visitor can find emblazoned on a rock in President Grover Cleveland Court in downtown Honolulu today--it became a cornerstone of the anti-annexationist position in the national struggle over Manifest Destiny taking place at the time. It was countered two months later by another voluminous document known as the Morgan Report, after the annexationist chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Democrat John Tyler Morgan of Alabama, who established to his own satisfaction, though not to that of all the members of his committee, just what he set out to establish, among other points: that Blount's appointment to Hawai'i without the consent of the Senate was illegal in the first place, and that no illegalities had been committed by US representatives or armed forces in Hawai'i in the second place.

"Manifest Destiny" was the catchphrase for a whole confluence of late nineteenth-century racial, economic and national defense issues that divided the public as intensely as any such issues since slavery. With its dark-skinned natives, burgeoning sugar plantations and strategic location, Hawai'i was at the center of the debates. While The Nation, along with Harper's Weekly and a number of influential papers across the country, was passionately in the anti-annexationist column [see boxes, pages 18 and 19], other papers, from the San Francisco Chronicle to the New York Sun, were just as eager for it to happen. The Anti-Imperialist League, with prominent members, sent speakers all over the country. Congress prevaricated. Despite his original hope of restoring Lili'uokalani to her throne, Cleveland appears to have been stymied by her alleged initial refusal to grant amnesty to those who conspired against her and by the stalemate in Congress. With their hopes for annexation stalled, on July 4, 1894, the leaders of the coup, who had been calling themselves the Provisional Government, renamed themselves the Republic of Hawai'i, further complicating efforts at US intervention, which they now claimed would be interference with the internal affairs of a sovereign state. In January 1895, after an unsuccessful native uprising against the government of which she was accused of having prior knowledge, Lili'uokalani was tried, convicted and imprisoned in 'Iolani Palace, which further strengthened the new government's position. In spring 1897, when expansionist Republican William McKinley succeeded Cleveland, the linked annexationists in Honolulu and Washington resumed their campaign. Still unable to achieve the two-thirds Senate majority required for ratification of annexation by treaty, Congressional annexationists attempted to acquire the islands by joint resolution of both houses--which also stalled until July 1898, two months after Commodore Dewey destroyed the Spanish fleet at Manila Bay, when it went through.

To those who had resisted the logic of Capt. Alfred Mahan, whose The Influence of Sea Power Upon History in 1890 had been followed by a pointed discussion in Forum titled "Hawaii and Our Future Sea Power" in 1893, the importance of our troops stopping over in Honolulu on their way to the Philippines now spoke for itself. There never was any treaty. On August 12, 1898, in a formal ceremony, Hawai'i was officially annexed, the land seized from the Kingdom in the 1893 coup included. In 1900 it became a territory. In 1959 in a referendum in which the only choice was whether the voter was for or against statehood--the restoration of the Kingdom or any other form of independence was not an option--it became the fiftieth state. The Blount Report has been challenged, ignored and, doubtless some would argue, transcended, but it has never been convincingly refuted. The issues of the illegality of the overthrow of the government of the Hawaiian Kingdom and the legality of the governments that followed have never really been settled.

III

In mid-1845 King Kamehameha III and his legislature received petitions from the common people of several islands warning that the sale of land to foreigners, their appointments to government offices and their induction as citizens should all be stopped. "The selling of lands to outsiders is not a wise course," said a petition from Kona. "If you wish to sell or lease the lands you should sell or lease them to your own people. By so doing the lands will remain as your own and you will continue to reign over the Hawaiian people and the country and everything in Hawai'i will not be taken away." "It is not proper that any foreigner should come in and be promoted in your kingdom, among your Chiefs and your people," argued a petition from Lāhainā. The whole idea of foreign citizenship was called into question. "What is to be the result of so many foreigners taking the oath of allegiance?" the Lāhainā petitioners asked. That "this kingdom will pass into their hands, and that too very soon," they answered themselves. "We, to whom the land has belonged from the beginning, shall all dwindle away."

What is remarkable about these petitions is not only their indication of the strength of the connection between the people and their sovereign, nor even their prescience in anticipating the effects that the incorporation of so many foreign elements would bring; it is that only twenty-five years after the New England missionaries began the work of creating a Hawaiian alphabet from the sounds of their unwritten language, the petitions were all in writing and that a mere six years after a declaration of principles of government informally known as the Hawaiian Magna Carta had begun to spell out the rights of ordinary citizens and limit those of the monarch, the rudimentary constitutional government to which they were addressed was well in place. While much of what came in with the foreigners has often been rejected or repudiated, the tools of literacy and democracy were quickly put to use.

The society the Native Hawaiians were seeking to preserve with their petitions was a stable, well-ordered hierarchical world in which the sense of belonging was so natural that no one could ever have noticed its existence until the way of life everyone had so naturally led had disappeared. It has been described in a recent comparative anthropological study as having the "most complex [social organization] of any Polynesian chiefdoms and probably of any chiefdoms known elsewhere in the world" at contact. From the first settlements, now generally thought to have been by voyagers from the Marquesas or Tahiti who arrived around the time of Christ, the small populations of all the islands gradually expanded in terrain, from the windward coasts into the leeward areas, and in numbers, until somewhere around 1100, when they were joined by a second migration, from Tahiti, which continued for a few hundred years. It is from this mix, during the period roughly between 1100 and perhaps 1600 or 1700, that the society now referred to as ancient Hawaiian civilization--with its distinctive technological accomplishments in aquaculture and agriculture, its distinctive cultural achievements in oral poetry and dance, and its distinctive combination of religious and political power--gradually solidified.

Described variously as feudal or communal, depending on the preconceptions of the observer, Hawaiian society as it existed at the time of European contact appears to have had one particularly notable feature: that however specialized and stratified social functions and social relationships might be, they were intrinsically reciprocal. This was particularly true of the relationship between the ali'i, the chiefs, and the maka'ainana, the common people, whose rights to the land were guaranteed regardless of changes in the fortunes of the high-ranking konohiki, or overseers, or even of the chiefs themselves, as a result of wars or other familial or political challenges. "A stone that is high up can roll down, but a stone that is down cannot roll" was the saying that articulated this principle. One of the many sources of the bond between the chiefs and the people was, as it always is, war. Although the dates are not firmly established, it appears that at least by the beginning of the eighteenth century a process of consolidation of separately ruled chiefdoms on each of the major islands, by war, was largely completed and by the end of the century the four separate island kingdoms of Ma¯ui, Hawai'i, O'ahu and Kaua'ī, but particularly Māui and Hawai'i, were each trying to consolidate the whole. It was a long, ambitious effort, involving major movements of men and supplies, taking place on both sides of European contact and before and after the incorporation of European weapons and ships. It was also exceedingly bloody. As most visitors today know from the signs atop the pali where it took place, about 10,000 warriors died in the 1795 Battle of Nu'anu alone, in which Hawai'i conquered O'ahu .

The unification of the islands at the same time that they were discovered by the West is the central fact of modern Hawaiian history, for it meant that just as the nation was coming together, the culture that made it one was coming apart. From the weapons demonstrations provided by the first white sailors who ended up staying on the islands, which helped King Kamehameha win the wars, to the diplomatic guidance provided him by British navigator George Vancouver, which helped him get his bearings in the world, the establishment of the united Kingdom and the influence of Westerners were intertwined. Everything that happened occurred against the backdrop of the European and American presence, including the famous events of 1819 celebrated throughout Christendom when, shortly after the death of Kamehameha, his chiefly successors renounced their native gods without ever having seen the first missionaries, who arrived the following year. By that time Western commercial traders had been flooding the country for more than a quarter-century, and their impunity from the tabus of the Hawaiian gods as well as their immunity from the diseases decimating the people were hard to miss.

As gaping as the religious void was a political void. With the previously unknown islands suddenly at the center of a burgeoning tricontinental trade in fur, sandalwood and whale oil, there were tasks to be performed for which the Hawaiians in their self-contained development could not possibly have been prepared. When the legislative council responded to the Lāhainā petitioners' request that the foreigners in the government be dismissed with the question, "If these shall be dismissed, where is there a man who is qualified to transact business with [other] foreigners?" they were not simply being self-serving, they were also being practical.

The most important business involving foreigners around the middle of the century--probably more far-reaching even than the treaties initiating the new Kingdom into the web of nations--was the introduction of private property, the conversion of the ancient system in which the land was used rather than owned into a system in which it could be bought and sold, a transformation known as the Māhele. Both the rationale and the process of the Māhele, whose aftermath is still in dispute, are too complicated to be briefly summarized, but it is the cornerstone of the subsequent development of the islands. When the initial land awards were completed, 70 percent of the maka'ainana had lost the rights to the land they and their ancestors had long enjoyed, and the acquisition of land by foreigners on which the great fortunes of the islands rest even today was well under way. It is difficult to imagine anything harder to bear for a people already bearing so much than the loss of their land. In the roughly fifty years between the Māhele and annexation, the native population approximately halved again, from 88,000 to about 40,000. In addition, with the expansion of the sugar industry beginning around the same time and the deliberate importation of foreign labor to keep the new plantations going, particularly the Chinese in the 1850s and the Japanese in the 1860s, Hawaiians were soon a much smaller percentage of the population as a whole--about half in the 1880s, about a quarter at annexation. Without a place in their own society, many natives who did not die of disease died of despair, a phenomenon noticed by European and Hawaiian observers alike. "The people dismissed freely their souls and died" was the Hawaiian way of putting it. It would be wrong to oversimplify the relationships between Europeans and Hawaiians. Among the Westerners from many different countries who left their mark on the new Kingdom were those who respected Hawaiian civilization as well as those who mocked it, those whose learning helped preserve some of its cultural treasures for later generations as well as those whose actions hastened their decay, those with genuine feeling for their Hawaiian wives, mistresses, friends and colleagues and those whose only feeling was for themselves. Whatever the character of individuals, however, the consequences of their collective presence--Hawaiian losses and haole gains--remained the same.

When David Kalākaua--the first monarch not of the direct Kamehameha lineage to rule the islands-- became King in 1874, he took as his motto Ho'oulu Lāhui: Increase the Nation. "I shall endeavor to preserve and increase the people that they shall multiply and fill the land with chiefs and commoners," he said in one of his first public speeches. Kalākaua is the most controversial figure in Hawaiian history, more so even than the Queen, his sister and successor. He is applauded and condemned in different quarters today almost as passionately as he was when he lived, in part because his legacy is so complex. Not only did he strengthen the Kingdom abroad through an unprecedented round-the-world voyage during which he impressed dignitaries from Tokyo to London with his intellect and sophistication--he also weakened it at home, where he undermined the balance between native and foreign power maintained by his predecessors by capitulating, under threat of force, to the aptly named 1887 Bayonet Constitution, which expanded the power of the latter at the expense of the former. Not only did he strengthen the nation's identity through such unifying symbols as the 'Iolani Palace and the statue of Kamehameha the Great, which still grace Honolulu today, he also weakened its security, particularly by the 1887 renewal of the 1876 sugar-inspired reciprocity treaty with the United States, which involved the first official abandonment of Hawaiian territorial sovereignty: the cession of Pearl Harbor. Controversial financial charges against Kalākaua, ranging from reckless extravagance to personal corruption, have also never gone out of circulation. Undoubtedly the principal reason for the continued debate about Kalākaua's place and stature is his continued relevance. He is one of the major links between the old Hawaiian civilization and the contemporary sovereignty movement. When he brought the missionary-outlawed hula back into public performance, when he set up a genealogical board to verify and record the true family histories of the endangered ali'i, when he created the semi-secret society Ka Hale Nauā--Temple of Wisdom--to preserve traditional forms of knowledge of the earth, sea and sky, he was giving his people back their interupted history. When he held his formal coronation and other public celebrations on the palace grounds, he was reinforcing a connection between the monarchy and the people that would help give them something to hold on to. While it is Lili'uokalani who is generally credited with leaving behind the legal framework that has made it possible for later generations to challenge the legitimacy of her successors, it may well have been Kalākaua who kept alive the love of the Kingdom that accounts for the outpourings of the 1993 centennial in the first place. The identification of the Hawaiian people with the monarchy is very strong. A few weeks after the coup, a musical friend of Lili'uokalani's was asked by members of the Royal Hawaiian Band who had refused to sign the new government's petition for annexation to the United States to write them a song that would express their loyalty to the Queen. You will not be paid... You will have to eat stones... is what they were told. The result was "Kaulana Nā Pua," Famous Are the Flowers, the "pua" frequently also translated as "children" or "descendants" but always meaning something growing out of and belonging to the land:


[I]Kaulana nā pua a'o
 Hawai'i
K ū pa'a mahope o ka 'āina
Hiki mai ka 'elele o ka loko
 'ino
Palapala 'ānunu me ka
 pākaha.

Pane mai Hawai'i moku o Keawe.
Kōkua nā Hono a'o Pi'ilani.
Kāko'o mai Kaua'i o Mano
Pa'apū me ke one
 Kakuhihewa.

'A'ole 'a' 'kau i ka pūlima
Maluna o ka pepa o ka 'enemi
Ho'ohui 'āina kū 'ai hewa
I ka pono sivila a'o ke kanaka.

'A'ole mākou a'e minamina
I ka pu'ukālā a ke
 aupuni.
Ua lawa makou i ka pōhaku,
I ka 'ai kamaha o o ka 'āina.

Mahope mākou o Lili'u-lani
A loa'a 'ē ka pono a ka
 'āina.
(A kau hou 'ia e ke kalaunu)
Ha'ina 'ia mai ana ka puana
Ka po'e i aloha i k
 'aina.

Famous are the children of
 Hawai'i
Ever loyal to the land
When the evil-hearted messenger
 comes
With his greedy document of
 extortion.

Hawai'i, land of Keawe, answers.
Pi'ilani's bays help.
Mano's Kaua'i lends support
And so do the sands of
 Kakuhihewa.

No one will fix a signature
To the paper of the enemy
With its sin of annexation
And sale of native civil rights.

We do not value
The government's sums of
 money.
We are satisfied with the stones.
Astonishing food of the land.

We back Lili'u-lani
Who has won the rights of the
 land.
(She will be crowned again.)
Tell the story
Of the people who love their
  land.

Soon the new government's demand that the band members sign "the paper of the enemy" had become a rallying call. In 1893 the people of Hawai'i had not yet lost their language--that would happen under the Territory--but even as they did, they kept this song. When it was revived by a leading popular musician near the beginning of the cultural revival in the 1970s, it fit right in. When it was sung--in Hawaiian--to the great throngs on the 'Iolani Palace grounds in the 1993 commemoration, the crowd knew the words.

IV

On January 3, 1976, a small group of citizens of the islands of Māui and Moloka'i crossed an eight-mile channel from Māui to begin the illegal occupation of an island few Americans even knew existed, the eighth and smallest of the major Hawaiian islands, Kaho'olawe. However little-known it was at the time, Kaho'olawe was known very well to the earliest Hawaiians, for whom it was the base for the celestial and navigational instruction that made possible the round-trip voyages from Hawai'i to Tahiti, which are thought to have gone on until around 1400. Its place names, such as Lae o Kealaikahiki, the "Point of Pathway to Tahiti," are full of information about its role. It was also well-known to the residents of the nearest parts of Māui and Lāna'i because ever since December 8, 1941, the day after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, it had been given over to the Navy for target practice, a function that continued well into the Vietnam era. When the bombs hit Kaho'olawe, you could see, hear and feel them throughout the neighboring islands. "As a child the shaking of all our windows as an everyday occurrence," a man from Lāna'i testified at a public hearing.

The struggle for Kaho'olawe is seen by many observers as the formative episode in the larger struggle to reclaim Hawaiian identity, which has been a force in the islands ever since because there was something so deeply Hawaiian about it. For one thing, it was about the land, to which Hawaiians understand themselves to be so genealogically related that its desecration becomes practically a family murder. From the first night spent on dry ground so littered with unexploded ordnance that any footstep might have led to death, the two members of the group who had avoided arrest by the Coast Guard felt themselves to be in the presence of their ancestors, and the more they learned as their movement widened and deepened, the more they learned that was true. Later archaeological surveys discovered more than 2,000 shrines, living areas and other evidence of a functioning society.

The character of the movement and the people in it was also distinctively Hawaiian. Organized as an 'ohana--family--rather than as a formal association, it blended the knowledge of the elders, who still knew from oral traditions something of the former status of Kaho'olawe, with the energies of the young people, who still had the will to reclaim it. Led by, among others, a charismatic singer-philosopher named George Helm, whose roots were deep in the rural soil of Moloka'i, the Protect Kaho'olawe 'Ohana, or PKO, attracted others with the same combination of intelligence and soul, and when Helm and an experienced boatman named Kimo Mitchell were lost at sea during another attempted landing in March 1977 the determination of the 'ohana further intensified. Just as there is no inauthenticity like that of the Hawaiian tourist industry, there is no authenticity like that of the true Hawaiian, and in light of its influence the juxtaposition of the sacredness of Kaho'olawe and its devastation began to appear more and more unacceptable. In 1980, as a result of PKO litigation, the Navy agreed to limit bombing, begin clearance of live munitions, institute conservation and reforestation measures, and allow access to PKO for four 
no-bombing days ten months a year to carry out its own preservation and restoration activities. In 1990 the bombing was ended completely, and in 1994 the island was returned to the State of Hawai'i along with $400 million from Washington to further its recovery. The island is still a dangerous place, and disagreements remain over who should control the right of access, the state or PKO, but when the children of Lāna'i and Māui look out today over the narrow channels that separate them from Kaho'olawe they see not the source of their nightmares but a source of pride.

The literal uncovering of the Hawaiian past on Kaho'olawe both strengthened and was strengthened by other political struggles and cultural retrievals occurring about the same time. In 1959, as the simultaneous arrival of statehood and jets brought with it a building boom that resulted in the displacement of many Native Hawaiian communities throughout the islands, there were organized protests and demonstrations from O'ahu to Kaua'i. There was the Hōkūle'a, a bold reconstruction of a Polynesian voyaging canoe, which made a successful journey from Māui to Tahiti by noninstrument navigation in thirty-two days in 1976, precisely duplicating the voyages recounted in ancestral chants--the first of many such navigational feats. There were young musicians exploring a newly realized Hawaiian-ness with such contributions as "Kaulana Nā Pua." There were hula teachers, traditional healers and practitioners of the Hawaiian martial art of lua, all survivors of a frail Polynesian underground that had somehow managed to sustain itself over the years. The more Hawaiians came together in protest or song, the more they understood that they were in fact Hawaiians and that they no longer knew what that meant.

Apart from the revered scholar, translator, songwriter and chanter Mary Kawena Pukui, whose works included the Hawaiian-English dictionary, a study of Hawaiian place names and an anthropological study of traditional Hawaiian society on the Big Island, where she was born, and those who collaborated with her, Hawaiian history under the Territory did not exist, either as academic enterprise or on the shelves. The writings of the great Hawaiian historian Samuel Kamakau had been published only in newspapers, mainly between 1866 and 1871, and were unavailable until translated and collected by Pukui in 1961. The invaluable works of preservation that had been undertaken toward the end of the nineteenth century--Abraham Fornander's three-volume An Account of the Polynesian Race, King Kalākaua's Legends and Myths of Hawaii, Nathaniel Emerson's Unwritten Literature of Hawaii--and even a unique series of lectures on ancient Hawaiian civilization sponsored by the Kamehameha School in the 1930s, had all gone out of print. As for the history of the Territory itself, it is perhaps best symbolized by the statue of President McKinley outside McKinley High School in Honolulu clutching a Treaty of Annexation that never was. The Queen was not fat, stupid, lazy and lascivious either, as children educated under the Territory were generally taught. Her autobiography, Hawaii's Story by Hawaii's Queen, which has proven to be the single most influential account of the overthrow and annexation, was also out of print.

The loss of history was inseparable from another fundamental loss, the Hawaiian language. What the missionaries had given in establishing the Hawaiian alphabet in the 1820s their descendants had taken away with the banning of Hawaiian as the medium of instruction in public and private schools in 1896. Nineteenth-century Hawaiians had amazed the world with the speed and pleasure with which they took to seeing their language in writing, achieving near-universal literacy in a few decades and mastering a wide range of subjects from math to geography in their native tongue. Shakespeare, along with the classic writers of other Western languages, was also translated into Hawaiian. In addition, over the course of the century about a hundred Hawaiian-language newspapers had come into being, with articles on subjects ranging from prayer to politics, making the written language an everyday, taken-for-granted thing. It did not take long for this legacy to be shattered. In stories too familiar from the experiences of indigenous people everywhere, great-grandparents alive today recall being slapped if they used a Hawaiian word on the school grounds and slapped harder if they used it a second time. Today's grandparents remember the shame of speaking the language as part of the larger shame of simply being Hawaiian. Many of today's parents and children grew up without ever hearing the language at all. With dwindling readership, the last of the Hawaiian-language newspapers went out of business around World War II. The number of native speakers of Hawaiian left in the 1980s was estimated to be under 2,000.

In 1983 a group of educators formed 'Aha Pūnana Leo, which means "language nest," expressing their wish to feed their ancestral language into the mouths of Hawaiian children as birds feed their young. Starting with one immersion preschool on Kaua'i, the immersion program now includes two independent K-12s as well as similar programs within the Hawaiian public school system. The numbers are small and the teachers involved are quick to stress the difficulties, including the paucity of curriculum materials and of other teachers, but the program is still turning out graduates who are fluent and literate in Hawaiian. Hawaiian is considered to be one of the most successful language-reclamation programs in the world, after Hebrew, which is one of its models, and it is itself a model for the revitalization of other indigenous languages in the United States and elsewhere. In the same period a new generation of scholars trained in the language, which had been available at the university level since 1921, began translating and interpreting nineteenth-century archives largely unused by previous historians, in time publishing a number of remarkable books that show the Hawaiians of the nineteenth century in a new and active light, both drawing on and enhancing the knowledge of the past [see "Resources," page 28]. There are also Hawaiian studies programs at the university campuses at Manoa and Hilo. Today, Hawaiian history is no longer so hard to find. Kamakau, Kalākaua, Emerson, Fornander and the Queen, among others, are all available at the supermarket.

So many recoveries led naturally to the question: why not the ultimate recovery--sovereignty? How the idea first arose is a subject on which there are many different opinions. What "sovereignty" might be exactly and how to get it are also the subject of many opinions. In the 1980s and '90s the strongest initiative came from a grassroots organization call Kā Lahui Hawai'i, which defined itself as a "nation within a nation" and enrolled as many as 20,000 Hawaiians in a constitutionally governed entity internal to the state with representation from all the islands. Recently, positions resting on international law--some stressing the illegality of the 1893 overthrow, others the illegitimacy of statehood on the grounds of the US unilateral withdrawal of Hawai'i from the UN's list of Non-Self-Governing Territories, still others combining both arguments--have been getting more attention. The underlying claim is the same laid out in the 1993 international tribunal: Hawaiian sovereignty was never legally relinquished. There are also numerous other variants, and numerous representatives of them, including a Hawaiian Kingdom and a Reinstated Hawaiian Kingdom, separate organizations, each with its own thinkers, strategies and shadow cabinet. For all its divisions, the sovereignty movement is a tightly knit political community, and for the most part people get along. All can agree with the recent formulation of one of their several spokespeople apropos the anticipated 2009 half-century anniversary of statehood: "To me statehood is not a reason for celebration. We've been led to believe that we were adopted, and then we found out we were kidnapped."

Despite the fact that inside the sovereignty camp it sometimes appears that its influence peaked with the flush of 1993, in other circles it is still seen as a rising force, enough to provoke a continuing reaction. In 2000, thanks to a Hawaiian incarnation of the conservative-libertarian ideological grouping that includes such US representatives as the Heritage and Heartland foundations, a challenge to the right of a state agency, the Office of Hawaiian Affairs (OHA), to confine voting for its trustees to citizens of Hawaiian descent was upheld by the Supreme Court, in Rice v. Cayetano, clearing a pathway for similar challenges to a variety of Native Hawaiian benefit programs, many of them administered by the OHA. (Another challenge, to the hallowed Hawaiians-only admission policy of the Kamehameha schools, settled out of court in 2007 after years of litigation, emerged from the same political constellation.) With health, income, education and other vital statistics consistently showing Native Hawaiians at the bottom of the ethnic social ladder, the threat to such aid as had emerged over the years was unacceptable to the state's Democratic leadership, which began pressing for a federally recognized tribal government for Native Hawaiians to protect the endangered programs. The legislation--known formally as the Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization Act and informally as the Akaka bill after Senator Daniel Akaka, who has introduced it regularly since 2000--has become the locus of an increasingly serious national debate centering on whether the bill recognizes Native Hawaiians on a political basis, which according to the bill's supporters has precedents in federal Indian policy and poses no constitutional problems, or on a racial basis, which, according to conservative opponents including the Bush White House, would be illegal. More recently, this argument has been taken up in the public arena, with conservative editorialists denouncing the bill's proposed creation of a special status for Native Hawaiians as at best discriminatory and at worst racist.

On the islands, too, the Akaka bill has generated increasing heat, and even fear, opposed by peculiar bedfellows: the constellation behind the legal challenges, led since 2001 by the Honolulu-based Grassroot Institute, who see it as dividing the citizens of Hawai'i into two classes according to race and opening the way to secession, and many sovereignty activists, who see it as distorting and undermining their fundamental identity. Their position is, We are not Native Americans, we are not even Native Hawaiians, we are Polynesians. Another commonality between the conservatives and the sovereignty movement is distrust of the OHA, the thirty-year-old agency that, as the chief lobbyist for the Akaka bill and the natural starting point for a future Native Hawaiian government, is widely seen as unable to separate advocacy for Native Hawaiians, which was its original mandate, from protecting its own bureaucracy, which was not. With Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama having recently stated that, unlike Bush, they would sign the Akaka bill should it pass Congress (and with John McCain also thought to support it), the long stalemate over the bill may be coming to an end. What happens if it becomes law is unpredictable. The bill is conspicuously vague. Deferring all important decisions to future "government-to-government" negotiations after a Native Hawaiian governing entity is created, the bill is so open-ended that no one knows where it will lead, including Senator Akaka, who told an NPR interviewer that it would be up to his grandchildren and great-grandchildren whether to seek independence--a bit of candor greeted in many quarters with a shiver.

The heart of the matter, long concealed by other things and staggering to contemplate now that it is being faced, is land: the 1.8 million acres "ceded" by the Republic to the United States at the time of annexation and referred to by everyone touched by the sovereignty movement as "stolen." This land involves roughly half the state of Hawai'i and includes some of its most valuable property, starting with the Honolulu airport. Whenever one of the islands' vigilant protest groups litigates or rallies against the environmental consequences of the Army's twenty-ton Strykers or the inter-island superferry or genetically modified seeds, the question is raised, Whose land is it, anyway?: the question of sovereignty. The crowds at sovereignty demonstrations are far smaller than in 1993, but the ideas of the sovereignty movement have taken hold.

The most remarkable thing about the present moment, in fact, is the extent to which the illegality of the American takeover is recognized. Despite the fact that the racial mixture of individuals and families is such that the question of who is "Hawaiian" can never be satisfactorily answered; despite the fact that a large proportion of families are thoroughly integrated into the economic status quo through the employment of one or more members in the military or tourist industry; despite the fact that, overall, the citizens of Hawai'i appear used to and indeed proud of being Americans, there is a widespread consensus, strengthened by the Apology Resolution, that the historical sequence that began with the takeover of the Hawaiian Kingdom and ended with Hawai'i's star on the American flag was wrong, and that the fact that it started a long time ago does not make it right. "If it is disgraceful for a single individual to steal, it is no less disgraceful for a nation, an aggregate of individuals, to steal...[and] I believe that when the American people fully understand the Hawaiian matter, they will condemn the great wrong done to the natives by the missionaries and their descendants," wrote Grover Cleveland's Secretary of State Walter Gresham in 1895, a prediction that seems finally to be coming true. No one thinks that that historical sequence can be reversed, but neither can it any longer be ignored. The next phases will be the stuff of politics on both sides of the water. As for the Native Hawaiians, whose very existence as a people was so long presumed doomed, they are moved simply to find themselves still here. "Hawaiians go back 1,200 generations," proclaimed one of the speakers at the most recent commemoration of the overthrow last January, "and we will be here for 1,200 more." So they are not in a terrible hurry. They know change takes time. Just offshore from the Big Island, Hawai'i, a new volcanic island is thrusting up from the ocean floor--Kama'ehu--already represented on a sovereignty T-shirt, though it is not expected to reach the surface for at least 10,000 years. In the words of a new chant accompanying a Hawaiian dance troupe's homage to the new arrival: "The child is born, the family grows."

[I] Get The Nation at home (and online!) Go on-site to sign up and to gain access to links within this article as well as how to access the other books on this subject. They are numerous. Just click on the following link:

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About Elinor Langer
Elinor Langer, a member of The Nation editorial board, is the author of Josephine Herbst and A Hundred Little Hitlers: The Death of a Black Man, the Trial of a White Racist and the Rise of the Neo-Nazi Movement in the United States. more... :: :: :: .

[Saundra Hummer]

.
* * * * *
The Last Roundup
(Surely this isn't about to happen in our lifetimes. SRH)
Is the government compiling a secret list of citizens to detain under martial law?
By
Christopher Ketcham
21/05/08 "Radar" -- -- 05/15/08 -- -In the spring of 2007, a retired senior official in the U.S. Justice Department sat before Congress and told a story so odd and ominous, it could have sprung from the pages of a pulp political thriller. It was about a principled bureaucrat struggling to protect his country from a highly classified program with sinister implications. Rife with high drama, it included a car chase through the streets of Washington, D.C., and a tense meeting at the White House, where the president's henchmen made the bureaucrat so nervous that he demanded a neutral witness be present.

The bureaucrat was James Comey, John Ashcroft's second-in-command at the Department of Justice during Bush's first term. Comey had been a loyal political foot soldier of the Republican Party for many years. Yet in his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, he described how he had grown increasingly uneasy reviewing the Bush administration's various domestic surveillance and spying programs. Much of his testimony centered on an operation so clandestine he wasn't allowed to name it or even describe what it did. He did say, however, that he and Ashcroft had discussed the program in March 2004, trying to decide whether it was legal under federal statutes. Shortly before the certification deadline, Ashcroft fell ill with pancreatitis, making Comey acting attorney general, and Comey opted not to certify the program. When he communicated his decision to the White House, Bush's men told him, in so many words, to take his concerns and stuff them in an undisclosed location.

Comey refused to knuckle under, and the dispute came to a head on the cold night of March 10, 2004, hours before the program's authorization was to expire. At the time, Ashcroft was in intensive care at George Washington Hospital following emergency surgery. Apparently, at the behest of President Bush himself, the White House tried, in Comey's words, "to take advantage of a very sick man," sending Chief of Staff Andrew Card and then–White House counsel Alberto Gonzales on a mission to Ashcroft's sickroom to persuade the heavily doped attorney general to override his deputy. Apprised of their mission, Comey, accompanied by a full security detail, jumped in his car, raced through the streets of the capital, lights blazing, and "literally ran" up the hospital stairs to beat them there.

Minutes later, Gonzales and Card arrived with an envelope filled with the requisite forms. Ashcroft, even in his stupor, did not fall for their heavy-handed ploy. "I'm not the attorney general," Ashcroft told Bush's men. "There"—he pointed weakly to Comey—"is the attorney general." Gonzales and Card were furious, departing without even acknowledging Comey's presence in the room. The following day, the classified domestic spying program that Comey found so disturbing went forward at the demand of the White House—"without a signature from the Department of Justice attesting as to its legality," he testified.

What was the mysterious program that had so alarmed Comey? Political blogs buzzed for weeks with speculation. Though Comey testified that the program was subsequently readjusted to satisfy his concerns, one can't help wondering whether the unspecified alteration would satisfy constitutional experts, or even average citizens. Faced with push-back from his bosses at the White House, did he simply relent and accept a token concession? Two months after Comey's testimony to Congress, the New York Times reported a tantalizing detail: The program that prompted him "to threaten resignation involved computer searches through massive electronic databases." The larger mystery remained intact, however. "It is not known precisely why searching the databases, or data mining, raised such a furious legal debate," the article conceded.

Another clue came from a rather unexpected source: President Bush himself. Addressing the nation from the Oval Office in 2005 after the first disclosures of the NSA's warrantless electronic surveillance became public, Bush insisted that the spying program in question was reviewed "every 45 days" as part of planning to assess threats to "the continuity of our government."

Few Americans—professional journalists included—know anything about so-called Continuity of Government (COG) programs, so it's no surprise that the president's passing reference received almost no attention. COG resides in a nebulous legal realm, encompassing national emergency plans that would trigger the takeover of the country by extra-constitutional forces—and effectively suspend the republic. In short, it's a road map for martial law.

While Comey, who left the Department of Justice in 2005, has steadfastly refused to comment further on the matter, a number of former government employees and intelligence sources with independent knowledge of domestic surveillance operations claim the program that caused the flap between Comey and the White House was related to a database of Americans who might be considered potential threats in the event of a national emergency. Sources familiar with the program say that the government's data gathering has been overzealous and probably conducted in violation of federal law and the protection from unreasonable search and seizure guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment.

According to a senior government official who served with high-level security clearances in five administrations, "There exists a database of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic, might be incarcerated. The database can identify and locate perceived 'enemies of the state' almost instantaneously." He and other sources tell Radar that the database is sometimes referred to by the code name Main Core. One knowledgeable source claims that 8 million Americans are now listed in Main Core as potentially suspect. In the event of a national emergency, these people could be subject to everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and possibly even detention.

Of course, federal law is somewhat vague as to what might constitute a "national emergency." Executive orders issued over the past three decades define it as a "natural disaster, military attack, [or] technological or other emergency," while Department of Defense documents include eventualities like "riots, acts of violence, insurrections, unlawful obstructions or assemblages, [and] disorder prejudicial to public law and order." According to one news report, even "national opposition to U.S. military invasion abroad" could be a trigger.

Let's imagine a harrowing scenario: coordinated bombings in several American cities culminating in a major blast—say, a suitcase nuke—in New York City. Thousands of civilians are dead. Commerce is paralyzed. A state of emergency is declared by the president. Continuity of Governance plans that were developed during the Cold War and aggressively revised since 9/11 go into effect. Surviving government officials are shuttled to protected underground complexes carved into the hills of Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. Power shifts to a "parallel government" that consists of scores of secretly preselected officials. (As far back as the 1980s, Donald Rumsfeld, then CEO of a pharmaceutical company, and Dick Cheney, then a congressman from Wyoming, were slated to step into key positions during a declared emergency.) The executive branch is the sole and absolute seat of authority, with Congress and the judiciary relegated to advisory roles at best. The country becomes, within a matter of hours, a police state.

Interestingly, plans drawn up during the Reagan administration suggest this parallel government would be ruling under authority given by law to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, home of the same hapless bunch that recently proved themselves unable to distribute water to desperate hurricane victims. The agency's incompetence in tackling natural disasters is less surprising when one considers that, since its inception in the 1970s, much of its focus has been on planning for the survival of the federal government in the wake of a decapitating nuclear strike.

Under law, during a national emergency, FEMA and its parent organization, the Department of Homeland Security, would be empowered to seize private and public property, all forms of transport, and all food supplies. The agency could dispatch military commanders to run state and local governments, and it could order the arrest of citizens without a warrant, holding them without trial for as long as the acting government deems necessary. From the comfortable perspective of peaceful times, such behavior by the government may seem far-fetched. But it was not so very long ago that FDR ordered 120,000 Japanese Americans—everyone from infants to the elderly—be held in detention camps for the duration of World War II. This is widely regarded as a shameful moment in U.S. history, a lesson learned. But a long trail of federal documents indicates that the possibility of large-scale detention has never quite been abandoned by federal authorities. Around the time of the 1968 race riots, for instance, a paper drawn up at the U.S. Army War College detailed plans for rounding up millions of "militants" and "American negroes," who were to be held at "assembly centers or relocation camps." In the late 1980s, the Austin American-Statesman and other publications reported the existence of 10 detention camp sites on military facilities nationwide, where hundreds of thousands of people could be held in the event of domestic political upheaval. More such facilities were commissioned in 2006, when Kellogg Brown & Root—then a subsidiary of Halliburton—was handed a $385 million contract to establish "temporary detention and processing capabilities" for the Department of Homeland Security. The contract is short on details, stating only that the facilities would be used for "an emergency influx of immigrants, or to support the rapid development of new programs." Just what those "new programs" might be is not specified.

In the days after our hypothetical terror attack, events might play out like this: With the population gripped by fear and anger, authorities undertake unprecedented actions in the name of public safety. Officials at the Department of Homeland Security begin actively scrutinizing people who—for a tremendously broad set of reasons—have been flagged in Main Core as potential domestic threats. Some of these individuals might receive a letter or a phone call, others a request to register with local authorities. Still others might hear a knock on the door and find police or armed soldiers outside. In some instances, the authorities might just ask a few questions. Other suspects might be arrested and escorted to federal holding facilities, where they could be detained without counsel until the state of emergency is no longer in effect.

It is, of course, appropriate for any government to plan for the worst. But when COG plans are shrouded in extreme secrecy, effectively unregulated by Congress or the courts, and married to an overreaching surveillance state—as seems to be the case with Main Core—even sober observers must weigh whether the protections put in place by the federal government are becoming more dangerous to America than any outside threat.

Another well-informed source—a former military operative regularly briefed by members of the intelligence community—says this particular program has roots going back at least to the 1980s and was set up with help from the Defense Intelligence Agency. He has been told that the program utilizes software that makes predictive judgments of targets' behavior and tracks their circle of associations with "social network analysis" and artificial intelligence modeling tools.

"The more data you have on a particular target, the better [the software] can predict what the target will do, where the target will go, who it will turn to for help," he says. "Main Core is the table of contents for all the illegal information that the U.S. government has [compiled] on specific targets." An intelligence expert who has been briefed by high-level contacts in the Department of Homeland Security confirms that a database of this sort exists, but adds that "it is less a mega-database than a way to search numerous other agency databases at the same time."

A host of publicly disclosed programs, sources say, now supply data to Main Core. Most notable are the NSA domestic surveillance programs, initiated in the wake of 9/11, typically referred to in press reports as "warrantless wiretapping."

In March, a front-page article in the Wall Street Journal shed further light onto the extraordinarily invasive scope of the NSA efforts: According to the Journal, the government can now electronically monitor "huge volumes of records of domestic e-mails and Internet searches, as well as bank transfers, credit card transactions, travel, and telephone records." Authorities employ "sophisticated software programs" to sift through the data, searching for "suspicious patterns." In effect, the program is a mass catalog of the private lives of Americans. And it's notable that the article hints at the possibility of programs like Main Core. "The [NSA] effort also ties into data from an ad-hoc collection of so-called black programs whose existence is undisclosed," the Journal reported, quoting unnamed officials. "Many of the programs in various agencies began years before the 9/11 attacks but have since been given greater reach."

The following information seems to be fair game for collection without a warrant: the e-mail addresses you send to and receive from, and the subject lines of those messages; the phone numbers you dial, the numbers that dial in to your line, and the durations of the calls; the Internet sites you visit and the keywords in your Web searches; the destinations of the airline tickets you buy; the amounts and locations of your ATM withdrawals; and the goods and services you purchase on credit cards. All of this information is archived on government supercomputers and, according to sources, also fed into the Main Core database.

Main Core also allegedly draws on four smaller databases that, in turn, cull from federal, state, and local "intelligence" reports; print and broadcast media; financial records; "commercial databases"; and unidentified "private sector entities." Additional information comes from a database known as the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, which generates watch lists from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for use by airlines, law enforcement, and border posts. According to the Washington Post, the Terrorist Identities list has quadrupled in size between 2003 and 2007 to include about 435,000 names. The FBI's Terrorist Screening Center border crossing list, which listed 755,000 persons as of fall 2007, grows by 200,000 names a year. A former NSA officer tells Radar that the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, using an electronic-funds transfer surveillance program, also contributes data to Main Core, as does a Pentagon program that was created in 2002 to monitor antiwar protesters and environmental activists such as Greenpeace.

If previous FEMA and FBI lists are any indication, the Main Core database includes dissidents and activists of various stripes, political and tax protesters, lawyers and professors, publishers and journalists, gun owners, illegal aliens, foreign nationals, and a great many other harmless, average people.

A veteran CIA intelligence analyst who maintains active high-level clearances and serves as an advisor to the Department of Defense in the field of emerging technology tells Radar that during the 2004 hospital room drama, James Comey expressed concern over how this secret database was being used "to accumulate otherwise private data on non-targeted U.S. citizens for use at a future time." Though not specifically familiar with the name Main Core, he adds, "What was being requested of Comey for legal approval was exactly what a Main Core story would be." A source regularly briefed by people inside the intelligence community adds: "Comey had discovered that President Bush had authorized NSA to use a highly classified and compartmentalized Continuity of Government database on Americans in computerized searches of its domestic intercepts. [Comey] had concluded that the use of that 'Main Core' database compromised the legality of the overall NSA domestic surveillance project."

If Main Core does exist, says Philip Giraldi, a former CIA counterterrorism officer and an outspoken critic of the agency, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is its likely home. "If a master list is being compiled, it would have to be in a place where there are no legal issues"—the CIA and FBI would be restricted by oversight and accountability laws—"so I suspect it is at DHS, which as far as I know operates with no such restraints." Giraldi notes that DHS already maintains a central list of suspected terrorists and has been freely adding people who pose no reasonable threat to domestic security. "It's clear that DHS has the mandate for controlling and owning master lists. The process is not transparent, and the criteria for getting on the list are not clear." Giraldi continues, "I am certain that the content of such a master list [as Main Core] would not be carefully vetted, and there would be many names on it for many reasons—quite likely including the two of us."

Would Main Core in fact be legal? According to constitutional scholar Bruce Fein, who served as associate deputy attorney general under Ronald Reagan, the question of legality is murky: "In the event of a national emergency, the executive branch simply assumes these powers"—the powers to collect domestic intelligence and draw up detention lists, for example—"if Congress doesn't explicitly prohibit it. It's really up to Congress to put these things to rest, and Congress has not done so." Fein adds that it is virtually impossible to contest the legality of these kinds of data collection and spy programs in court "when there are no criminal prosecutions and [there is] no notice to persons on the president's 'enemies list.' That means if Congress remains invertebrate, the law will be whatever the president says it is—even in secret. He will be the judge on his own powers and invariably rule in his own favor."

The veteran CIA intelligence analyst notes that Comey's suggestion that the offending elements of the program were dropped could be misleading: "Bush [may have gone ahead and] signed it as a National Intelligence Finding anyway."

But even if we never face a national emergency, the mere existence of the database is a matter of concern. "The capacity for future use of this information against the American people is so great as to be virtually unfathomable," the senior government official says.
In any case, mass watch lists of domestic citizens may do nothing to make us safer from terrorism. Jeff Jonas, chief scientist at IBM, a world-renowned expert in data mining, contends that such efforts won't prevent terrorist conspiracies. "Because there is so little historical terrorist event data," Jonas tells Radar, "there is not enough volume to create precise predictions."

The overzealous compilation of a domestic watch list is not unique in postwar American history. In 1950, the FBI, under the notoriously paranoid J. Edgar Hoover, began to "accumulate the names, identities, and activities" of suspect American citizens in a rapidly expanding "security index," according to declassified documents. In a letter to the Truman White House, Hoover stated that in the event of certain emergency situations, suspect individuals would be held in detention camps overseen by "the National Military Establishment." By 1960, a congressional investigation later revealed, the FBI list of suspicious persons included "professors, teachers, and educators; labor-union organizers and leaders; writers, lecturers, newsmen, and others in the mass-media field; lawyers, doctors, and scientists; other potentially influential persons on a local or national level; [and] individuals who could potentially furnish financial or material aid" to unnamed "subversive elements." This same FBI "security index" was allegedly maintained and updated into the 1980s, when it was reportedly transferred to the control of none other than FEMA (though the FBI denied this at the time).

FEMA, however—then known as the Federal Preparedness Agency—already had its own domestic surveillance system in place, according to a 1975 investigation by Senator John V. Tunney of California. Tunney, the son of heavyweight boxing champion Gene Tunney and the inspiration for Robert Redford's character in the film The Candidate, found that the agency maintained electronic dossiers on at least 100,000 Americans that contained information gleaned from wide-ranging computerized surveillance. The database was located in the agency's secret underground city at Mount Weather, near the town of Bluemont, Virginia. The senator's findings were confirmed in a 1976 investigation by the Progressive magazine, which found that the Mount Weather computers "can obtain millions of pieces [of] information on the personal lives of American citizens by tapping the data stored at any of the 96 Federal Relocation Centers"—a reference to other classified facilities. According to the Progressive, Mount Weather's databases were run "without any set of stated rules or regulations. Its surveillance program remains secret even from the leaders of the House and the Senate."

Ten years later, a new round of government martial law plans came to light. A report in the Miami Herald contended that Reagan loyalist and Iran-Contra conspirator Colonel Oliver North had spearheaded the development of a "secret contingency plan,"—code-named REX 84—which called "for suspension of the Constitution, turning control of the United States over to FEMA, [and the] appointment of military commanders to run state and local governments." The North plan also reportedly called for the detention of upwards of 400,000 illegal aliens and an undisclosed number of American citizens in at least 10 military facilities maintained as potential holding camps.

North's program was so sensitive in nature that when Texas congressman Jack Brooks attempted to question North about it during the 1987 Iran-Contra hearings, he was rebuffed even by his fellow legislators. "I read in Miami papers and several others that there had been a plan by that same agency [FEMA] that would suspend the American Constitution," Brooks said. "I was deeply concerned about that and wondered if that was the area in which he [North] had worked." Senator Daniel Inouye, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Iran, immediately cut off his colleague, saying, "That question touches upon a highly sensitive and classified area, so may I request that you not touch upon that, sir." Though Brooks pushed for an answer, the line of questioning was not allowed to proceed.

Wired magazine turned up additional damaging information, revealing in 1993 that North, operating from a secure White House site, allegedly employed a software database program called PROMIS (ostensibly as part of the REX 84 plan). PROMIS, which has a strange and controversial history, was designed to track individuals—prisoners, for example—by pulling together information from disparate databases into a single record. According to Wired, "Using the computers in his command center, North tracked dissidents and potential troublemakers within the United States. Compared to PROMIS, Richard Nixon's enemies list or Senator Joe McCarthy's blacklist look downright crude." Sources have suggested to Radar that government databases tracking Americans today, including Main Core, could still have PROMIS-based legacy code from the days when North was running his programs.

In the wake of 9/11, domestic surveillance programs of all sorts expanded dramatically. As one well-placed source in the intelligence community puts it, "The gloves seemed to come off." What is not yet clear is what sort of still-undisclosed programs may have been authorized by the Bush White House. Marty Lederman, a high-level official at the Department of Justice under Clinton, writing on a law blog last year, wondered, "How extreme were the programs they implemented [after 9/11]? How egregious was the lawbreaking?" Congress has tried, and mostly failed, to find out.

In July 2007 and again last August, Representative Peter DeFazio, a Democrat from Oregon and a senior member of the House Homeland Security Committee, sought access to the "classified annexes" of the Bush administration's Continuity of Government program. DeFazio's interest was prompted by Homeland Security Presidential Directive 20 (also known as NSPD-51), issued in May 2007, which reserves for the executive branch the sole authority to decide what constitutes a national emergency and to determine when the emergency is over. DeFazio found this unnerving.

But he and other leaders of the Homeland Security Committee, including Chairman Bennie Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat, were denied a review of the Continuity of Government classified annexes. To this day, their calls for disclosure have been ignored by the White House. In a press release issued last August, DeFazio went public with his concerns that the NSPD-51 Continuity of Government plans are "extra-constitutional or unconstitutional." Around the same time, he told the Oregonian: "Maybe the people who think there's a conspiracy out there are right."

Congress itself has recently widened the path for both extra-constitutional detentions by the White House and the domestic use of military force during a national emergency. The Military Commissions Act of 2006 effectively suspended habeas corpus and freed up the executive branch to designate any American citizen an "enemy combatant" forfeiting all privileges accorded under the Bill of Rights. The John Warner National Defense Authorization Act, also passed in 2006, included a last-minute rider titled "Use of the Armed Forces in Major Public Emergencies," which allowed the deployment of U.S. military units not just to put down domestic insurrections—as permitted under posse comitatus and the Insurrection Act of 1807—but also to deal with a wide range of calamities, including "natural disaster, epidemic, or other serious public health emergency, terrorist attack, or incident."

More troubling, in 2002, Congress authorized funding for the U.S. Northern Command, or NORTHCOM, which, according to Washington Post military intelligence expert William Arkin, "allows for emergency military operations in the United States without civilian supervision or control."

"We are at the edge of a cliff and we're about to fall off," says constitutional lawyer and former Reagan administration official Bruce Fein. "To a national emergency planner, everybody looks like a danger to stability. There's no doubt that Congress would have the authority to denounce all this—for example, to refuse to appropriate money for the preparation of a list of U.S. citizens to be detained in the event of martial law. But Congress is the invertebrate branch. They say, 'We have to be cautious.' The same old crap you associate with cowards. None of this will change under a Democratic administration, unless you have exceptional statesmanship and the courage to stand up and say, 'You know, democracies accept certain risks that tyrannies do not.'"

As of this writing, DeFazio, Thompson, and the other 433 members of the House are debating the so-called Protect America Act, after a similar bill passed in the Senate. Despite its name, the act offers no protection for U.S. citizens; instead, it would immunize from litigation U.S. telecom giants for colluding with the government in the surveillance of Americans to feed the hungry maw of databases like Main Core. The Protect America Act would legalize programs that appear to be unconstitutional.

Meanwhile, the mystery of James Comey's testimony has disappeared in the morass of election year coverage. None of the leading presidential candidates have been asked the questions that are so profoundly pertinent to the future of the country: As president, will you continue aggressive domestic surveillance programs in the vein of the Bush administration? Will you release the COG blueprints that Representatives DeFazio and Thompson were not allowed to read? What does it suggest about the state of the nation that the U.S. is now ranked by worldwide civil liberties groups as an "endemic surveillance society," alongside repressive regimes such as China and Russia? How can a democracy thrive with a massive apparatus of spying technology deployed against every act of political expression, private or public? (Radar put these questions to spokespeople for the McCain, Obama, and Clinton campaigns, but at press time had yet to receive any responses.)

These days, it's rare to hear a voice like that of Senator Frank Church, who in the 1970s led the explosive investigations into U.S. domestic intelligence crimes that prompted the very reforms now being eroded. "The technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny," Church pointed out in 1975. "And there would be no way to fight back, because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know."


UPDATE: Since this article went to press, several documents have emerged to suggest the story has longer legs than we thought. Most troubling among these is an October 2001 Justice Department memo that detailed the extra-constitutional powers the U.S. military might invoke during domestic operations following a terrorist attack. In the memo, John Yoo, then deputy assistant attorney general, "concluded that the Fourth Amendment had no application to domestic military operations." (Yoo, as most readers know, is author of the infamous Torture Memo that, in bizarro fashion, rejiggers the definition of "legal" torture to allow pretty much anything short of murder.) In the October 2001 memo, Yoo refers to a classified DOJ document titled "Authority for Use of Military Force to Combat Terrorist Activities Within the United States." According to the Associated Press, "Exactly what domestic military action was covered by the October memo is unclear. But federal documents indicate that the memo relates to the National Security Agency's Terrorist Surveillance Program." Attorney General John Mukasey last month refused to clarify before Congress whether the Yoo memo was still in force.

Meanwhile, congressional sources tell Radar that Congressman Peter DeFazio has apparently abandoned his effort to get to the bottom of the White House COG classified annexes. Penny Dodge, DeFazio's chief of staff, says otherwise. "We will be sending a letter requesting a classified briefing soon," she told Radar this week.

Christopher Ketcham writes for Harper's, GQ, and Mother Jones, among other publications. He splits his time between Utah and Brooklyn, NY.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info
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. . . . . . .
IVAW on PBS NewsHour tonight!
Tonight, May 21st, the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer will have a report on IVAW's recent Winter Soldier on the Hill hearings in Congress.

The NewsHour broadcasts at 6pm local time on most PBS stations, and is repeated later in the evening on some stations.

Check the NewsHour website for local broadcast times.

Iraq Veterans Against the War

Our postal address is
PO Box 8296
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19101
United States
Click below to see this in your browser
http://ivaw.org/newsletters/5.21.08alert.html . . . . .

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~~~~~~~~~ Former Clinton Whitehouse aide:
We're in for a "cataclysmic" Bush endgame
Sidney Blumenthal says Bush feels "unconstrained."
May 20, 2008 1:52 PM
Sidney Blumenthal, journalist, former Clinton White House aide and senior advisor to Hillary Clinton, today spoke at Third Way to promote his new book "The Strange Death of Republican America".
He said that the US faces a "cataclysmic" final few months of the Bush term, and that Bush is determined to leave a lasting mark on the world regardless of who is elected the next president.

"Bush feels unconstrained right now, and a sense of urgency," Blumenthal said, later referring to a Jerusalem Post story that warns Bush plans to attack Iran before his term ends in January.

On the battle for the 2008 election, Blumenthal said the Democrats are mistaken in their effort to define John McCain as offering a third Bush term. He said that's inaccurate and the public won't buy it. "It's a hard sell," he said. McCain has other weaknesses the Dems should press harder, Blumenthal said.
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/usa/2008/05/former_clinton_whitehouse_aide.html
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info~~~~~~~~~~~~~ .

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~~~~~~~"We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light."

Plato
~~~
"The state has, in order to control us, introduced division into our thinking, so that we come to distrust others and look to the state for protection! But the roots of our individualism remind us that what we are is inseparable from the source from which all others derive; that coercive practices that threaten our neighbor also threaten us."

Butler Shaffer
~~~
"The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human."

Aldous Huxley
~~~
"Because we fear the responsibility for our actions, we have allowed ourselves to develop the mentality of slaves. Contrary to the stirring sentiments of the Declaration of Independence, we now pledge "our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor" not to one another for our mutual protection, but to the state, whose actions continue to exploit, despoil, and destroy us."

Butler D. Shaffer
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<<<>>>Iraqi TV station says U.S. troops killed cameraman
Thu May 22, 2008 11:06am EDT
By
Aseel Kami and Khalid al-Ansary
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - An Iraqi television station accused U.S. troops on Thursday of shooting dead one of its cameramen as he walked to his Baghdad home.

The body of a second journalist, Haidar Hashim al-Husseini, a reporter for al-Sharq newspaper, was found dumped in a field with nine other corpses in Diyala province, police and colleagues said.

A spokeswoman for the Afaq television channel said cameraman Wisam Ali Ouda was shot dead by U.S. soldiers in eastern Baghdad's Obaidi district at around 5pm on Wednesday.

"We confirm one of our employees was killed by an American sniper," said Bushra Abdul-Amir, head of public relations at the station. She added that witnesses had given testimony to the station's managers.

Hadi Jalu, deputy director of Iraq's Journalistic Freedoms Observatory, said he had also interviewed witnesses on the scene who had corroborated this, without saying how many. "They all said an American soldier killed him," he said.

A spokesman for the U.S. military in Baghdad, Lieutenant-Colonel Steven Stover, said no civilians had been killed during military operations in Obaidi on Wednesday, which starting in the morning and continued into the night.

"All extremists were ... either committing a violent act or posed a threat to commit a violent act," he said.

Colleagues of Ouda, 32, said he was buried in the holy city of Najaf on Thursday.

"Wisam was one of our most prominent cameramen. We loudly condemn the killing of journalists," the station's director, Mohammed Thiab al-Baidhani, told Reuters.

In a separate incident north of Baghdad, al-Sharq reporter Husseini was kidnapped outside his home in Diyala on Tuesday, said the newspaper's editor-in-chief, Abdul-Rasool Ziyara.

Ziyara said police found his body, along with nine others, in a field on Wednesday. His hands and feet were bound and he had a gunshot wound to the head. There were signs of torture.

"I'm sure he was killed because he was Shi'ite," Ziyara said.

Iraq, which witnessed significant growth in the media after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, is the most dangerous place in the world for journalists to work, according to a New York-based journalism watchdog, the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Iraqi journalists have been targeted because of their work or caught up in the cross-fire of Iraq's many-sided conflict.

Early this month, gunmen shot dead Sarwa Abdul-Wahab, a female Iraqi reporter, in Iraq's northern city of Mosul.

About 130 journalists, Iraqi and foreign, have been killed in Iraq since 2003.

Most television stations and newspapers in Iraq are owned by political and religious sects or ethnic groups. Militants often target journalists whom they perceive to be on the side of their enemies in a particular conflict.

(Additional reporting and writing by Tim Cocks; Editing by David Fogarty)
© Thomson Reuters 2008. All rights reserved.

Reuters journalists are subject to the Reuters Editorial Handbook which requires fair presentation and disclosure of relevant interests. Go onsite to view this article and others, check archives, etc. Just click below:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info
<<<<<>>>>> .

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)))))O((((( EPA Chief Silent on White House Involvement in Key Decisions

By J.R. Pegg
WASHINGTON, DC, May 21, 2008 (ENS) - The head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency stonewalled Democratic lawmakers Tuesday, refusing to provide information about the role the White House played in recent agency decisions involving the regulation of greenhouse gases and the finalization of a new federal smog standard. The defiance of EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson drew a sharp rebuke from the Democratic chair of the House Oversight and Government Affairs Committee, who said the EPA chief has repeatedly bowed to pressure from the White House and become "essentially a figurehead."

"My concern is decisions at EPA are not being made on the science and they are not being made on the law," said committee Chairman Henry Waxman, a California Democrat. "They are being made at the White House and they are being made for political reasons."


Congressman Henry Waxman chairs the House Oversight and Government Affairs Committee. (Photo courtesy Office of the Congressman)
Waxman said senior EPA staff had told Congressional investigators that Johnson reversed course on the smog standard, abandoning a plan to set a secondary standard designed to protect natural ecosystems from ground-level ozone, the key ingredient in smog.

The investigation by Waxman's committee found that the president weighed in with his opposition to a secondary ozone standard only hours before EPA finalized the new rule on March 12.

The EPA's Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee, CASAC, had recommended setting such a standard to better protect natural ecosystems from the hazards of smog. Documents show Johnson initially agreed with that recommendation. The final rule did not set a secondary standard.

Waxman also pointed to depositions from agency staff that said Johnson caved to the White House in deciding to reject California's request to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from automobiles.

He criticized the EPA chief for a second global warming decision, pointing to agency documents and testimony that indicate Johnson was prepared to push forward last December with an agency effort to begin exploring how to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant, only to abandon the plan due to White House pressure.

"Three times in the last six months you have recommended to the White House that EPA take steps to address climate change and protect the environment," Waxman told Johnson. "In each case, your positions were right on the science and the law but in each case you backed down."

Waxman added that Johnson and other administration officials have failed to fill in gaps about how the process for each of the decisions was completed and questioned the legality of the White House's involvement.

"The president apparently insisted on his judgment and overrode the unanimous recommendations of EPA scientific and legal experts," he said "Our investigation has not been able to find any evidence that the president based his decisions on the science, the record, or the law. Indeed, there's virtually no credible record of any kind in support of the decisions."


EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson (Photo courtesy EPA)
Johnson defended his actions and repeatedly stymied Democrats looking for answers. He insisted that he was solely responsible for the decisions in question and declined to provide details about his meetings with the president and other White House officials.

"I have routine meetings with the executive branch including the president … those meetings are in confidence," Johnson told the committee.

Under a barrage of questions from New Hampshire Democrat Paul Hodes, Johnson refused to even acknowledge discussing the decisions with president or other White House officials.

"If I did recall, I'm not sure it would be appropriate for me to get into who said what at what time," Johnson said. "I don't believe that it is appropriate for me to discuss the nature of those conversations."

The EPA chief added that disclosing such information would limit his ability to have candid conversations with the White House about policy and regulatory matters.


President George W. Bush stands beside EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson as he takes his oath of office, May 23, 2005. (Photo by Paul Morse courtesy The White House)
Waxman grew visibly frustrated with Johnson during the nearly three hours of questioning.

"It seems to me you are being awfully evasive," Waxman said. "No one is asking you what you said, but if there was a conversation."

Johnson didn't budge, repeating that he has had "routine conversations" with White House officials on many EPA matters.

Republicans on the panel rallied to the Johnson's defense, questioning the motives behind the hearing and arguing that White House involvement in EPA decisions is neither inappropriate nor rare.

"Yes, there is undue influence … but no one administration has a monopoly on that," said Representative Brian Bilbray, a California Republican.

The president is entitled by law to be involved in EPA decisions, said California Republican Darrell Issa.

With regard to the ozone standards, Issa said, the president did provide his opinion and "made no pretense" that he did not.

The president's role "does not reflect any unusual or improper action," Issa said, adding that setting a secondary standard would do little to further protect wildlife and vegetation.

The EPA chief is not obligated to "simply rubberstamp" CASAC's advice, Issa said. "By definition recommendations can be rejected."

But the head of CASAC, Dr. Rogene Henderson, and Democrats on the panel said they wanted to know the reasoning behind the decision and why Johnson gave in to the White House.

The advice that appears to be trumping CASAC "is not transparent," Henderson told the committee. "Willful ignorance triumphed over sound science."

Johnson replied that he made the decision "based on all the science before me" and praised the transparency of the process.

"This is good government," he said.

The EPA chief took issue with the report that he had initially supported partially granting the California waiver, saying he had considered a wide range of "legally defensible" options before denying the request.

"I evaluated all options," Johnson said.

He also told the committee that EPA does intend to move forward with a preliminary notice for options for regulating greenhouse gases next month.

But Johnson said lawmakers should develop a new law to tackle carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, rather than relying on the Clean Air Act, which he contends is poorly designed to tackle the concern.

"A legislative fix is a much better approach to working with the intricacies of the Clean Air Act and the likely litigation that would ensue," he said.

That comment drew another rebuke from the committee chair.

"Even if you'd like another law you have to enforce the law that is there," Waxman said.

The California Democrat told Johnson he would continue to push for additional documents and information about the three decisions.

"You are trying to shield the White House from reasonable oversight," Waxman said. "Unless you assert executive privilege … we expect compliance with the subpoenas."

Copyright Environment News Service (ENS) 2008.
All rights reserved
Go on-site for photo's and other articles about our environment.

http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/may2008/2008-05-21-10.asp
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. . . . . . . . . River of Resistance: How the American Imperial Dream Foundered in IraqThursday 22 May 2008
by
Michael Schwartz
Tomdispatch.com

In Falluja and elsewhere, militias have frustrated the power of the US military. (Photo: Karim Kadim / Associated Press) Go on site to gain access to photos, as well as links to other articles by this author.

http://www.truthout.org/article/river-resistance-how-american-imperial-dream-foundered-iraq

On February 15, 2003, ordinary citizens around the world poured into the streets to protest George W. Bush's onrushing invasion of Iraq.

Demonstrations took place in large cities and small towns globally, including a small but spirited protest at the McMurdo Station in Antarctica. Up to 30 million people, who sensed impending catastrophe, participated in what Rebecca Solnit, that apostle of popular hope, has called "the biggest and most widespread collective protest the world has ever seen."

The first glancing assessment of history branded this remarkable planetary protest a record-breaking failure, since the Bush administration, less than one month later, ordered U.S. troops across the Kuwaiti border and on to Baghdad.

And it has since largely been forgotten, or perhaps better put, obliterated from official and media memory. Yet popular protest is more like a river than a storm; it keeps flowing into new areas, carrying pieces of its earlier life into other realms. We rarely know its consequences until many years afterward, when, if we're lucky, we finally sort out its meandering path. Speaking for the protesters back in May 2003, only a month after U.S. troops entered the Iraqi capital, Solnit offered the following:

"We will likely never know, but it seems that the Bush administration decided against the 'Shock and Awe' saturation bombing of Baghdad because we made it clear that the cost in world opinion and civil unrest would be too high. We millions may have saved a few thousand or a few tens of thousand of lives. The global debate about the war delayed it for months, months that perhaps gave many Iraqis time to lay in stores, evacuate, brace for the onslaught."

Whatever history ultimately concludes about that unexpected moment of protest, once the war began, other forms of resistance arose - mainly in Iraq itself - that were equally unexpected. And their effects on the larger goals of Bush administration planners can be more easily traced. Think of it this way: In a land the size of California with but 26 million people, a ragtag collection of Baathists, fundamentalists, former military men, union organizers, democratic secularists, local tribal leaders, and politically active clerics - often at each others throats (quite literally) - nonetheless managed to thwart the plans of the self-proclaimed New Rome, the "hyperpower" and "global sheriff" of Planet Earth. And that, even in the first glancing assessment of history, may indeed prove historic.


The New American Century Goes Missing in Action
It's hard now even to recall the original vision George W. Bush and his top officials had of how the conquest of Iraq would unfold as an episode in the President's Global War on Terror. In their minds, the invasion was sure to yield a quick victory, to be followed by the creation of a client state that would house crucial "enduring" U.S. military bases from which Washington would project power throughout what they liked to term "the Greater Middle East."

In addition, Iraq was quickly going to become a free-market paradise, replete with privatized oil flowing at record rates onto the world market. Like falling dominos, Syria and Iran, cowed by such a demonstration of American might, would follow suit, either from additional military thrusts or because their regimes - and those of up to 60 countries worldwide - would appreciate the futility of resisting Washington's demands. Eventually, the "unipolar moment" of U.S. global hegemony that the collapse of the Soviet Union had initiated would be extended into a "New American Century" (along with a generational Pax Republicana at home).

This vision is now, of course, long gone, largely thanks to unexpected and tenacious resistance of every sort within Iraq. This resistance consisted of far more than the initial Sunni insurgency that tied down what Donald Rumsfeld pridefully labeled "the greatest military force on the face of the earth." It is already none too rash a statement to suggest that, at all levels of society, usually at great sacrifice, the Iraqi people frustrated the imperial designs of a superpower.

Consider, for example, the myriad ways in which the Iraqi Sunnis resisted the occupation of their country from almost the moment the Bush administration's intention to fully dismantle Saddam Hussein's Baathist regime became clear. The largely Sunni city of Falluja, like most other communities around the country, spontaneously formed a new government based on local clerical and tribal structures. Like many of these cities, it avoided the worst of the post-invasion looting by encouraging the formation of local militias to police the community. Ironically, the orgy of looting that took place in Baghdad was, at least in part, a consequence of the U.S. military presence, which delayed the creation of such militias there. Eventually, however, sectarian militias brought a modicum of order even to Baghdad.

In Falluja and elsewhere, these same militias soon became effective instruments for reducing, and - for a time - eliminating, the presence of the U.S. military. For the better part of a year, faced with IEDs and ambushes from insurgents, the U.S. military declared Falluja a "no go" zone, withdrew to bases outside the city, and discontinued violent incursions into hostile neighborhoods. This retreat was matched in many other cities and towns. The absence of patrols by occupation forces saved tens of thousands of "suspected insurgents" from the often deadly violence of home invasions, and their relatives from wrecked homes and detained family members.

Even the most successful of U.S. military adventures in that period, the second battle of Falluja in November 2004, could also be seen, from quite a different perspective, as a successful act of resistance. Because the United States was required to mass a significant proportion of its combat brigades for the offensive (even transferring British troops from the south to perform logistical duties), most other cities were left alone. Many of these cities used this respite from the U.S. military to establish, or consolidate, autonomous governments or quasi-governments and defensive militias, making it all the more difficult for the occupation to control them.

Falluja itself was, of course, destroyed, with 70% of its buildings turned to rubble, and tens of thousands of its residents permanently displaced - an extreme sacrifice that had the unexpected effect of taking pressure off other Iraqi cities for a while. In fact, the ferocity of the resistance in the predominantly Sunni areas of Iraq forced the American military to wait almost four years before renewing their initial 2004 efforts to pacify the well-organized Sadrist-led resistance in the predominantly Shia areas of the country.


The Rebellion of the Oil Workers
In another arena entirely, consider the Bush administration's dreams of harnessing Iraqi oil production to its foreign policy ambitions. The immediate goals, as American planners saw it, were to double prewar output and begin the process of transferring control of production from state ownership to foreign companies. Three major energy initiatives designed to accomplish these goals have so far been frustrated by resistance from virtually every segment of Iraqi society. Iraq's well-organized oil workers played a key role in this by using their ability to bring production to a virtual stand-still in order to abort the transfer - only a few months after the U.S. toppled Saddam Hussein's regime - of the operation of the southern oil port of Basra to the management of then-Halliburton subsidiary KBR.

This and other early acts of labor defiance turned back the initial assault on the Iraqi government-controlled system of oil production. Such acts also laid a foundation for successful efforts to prevent the passage of oil policies shaped in Washington that were designed to transfer control of energy exploration and production to foreign companies. In these efforts, the oil workers were joined by both Sunni and Shia resistance groups, local governments, and finally the new national parliament.

This same sort of resistance extended to the whole roster of neoliberal reforms sponsored by the U.S.-controlled Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). From the beginning of the occupation, for instance, there were protests against mass unemployment caused by the dismantling of the Baathist state and the shuttering of state-owned factories. Much of the armed resistance was a response to the occupation's early violent suppression of these protests.

Even more significant were local efforts to replace the government services discontinued by the CPA. The same local quasi-governments that had nurtured the militias sought to sustain or replace Baathist social programs, often by siphoning off oil destined for export onto the black-market to pay for local services, and hoarding local resources such as electrical generation. The result would be the creation of virtual city-states wherever U.S. troops were not present, leading to the inability of the occupation to "pacify" any substantial portion of the country.

The Sadrist movement and the Mahdi Army militia of cleric Muqtada al-Sadr was probably the most successful - and most anti-occupation - of the Shia political parties-cum-militias that systematically sought to develop quasi-government organizations. They tried to meet, however minimally, some of the basic needs of their communities, supplying food baskets, housing services, and serving a host of other functions previously promised by the Baathist government, but forsworn by the U.S. occupation and the Iraqi government that the United States installed when "handing over" sovereignty in June 2004.

The American occupationaires expected that their plans for the rapid privatization and transformation of the state-driven economy would indeed generate resistance, but they were convinced that this would subside quickly once the new economy kicked into gear. Instead, as the occupation wore on, demands for relief grew more strident and insistent, while the country itself, in chaos and near collapse, became visible evidence of the failure of the Bush administration's "free market" policies.


An Iraqi Agenda for Withdrawal
Occupation officials faced the same dilemma in the political realm. The original goal of the Bush administration was a stable, pro-Washington government, stripped of its economic and political dominance over Iraqi society, but a bastion of resistance to Iranian regional power. This vision, like its military and economic cousins, has long since disappeared under the weight of Iraqi resistance.

Take, for example, the two high profile Iraqi elections, celebrated in the mainstream American media as a unique Bush administration accomplishment in the otherwise relentlessly autocratic Middle East. Inside Iraq, however, they had quite a different look. It is important to remember that the United States initially planned to sustain its direct rule - the Coalition Provisional Authority - until the country was fully pacified and its economic reforms completed. When the CPA became a hated symbol of an unwanted occupation, planning shifted to the idea of installing an appointed Iraqi government, based on community meetings that only supporters of the occupation could attend. Full-scale elections would be postponed until winners fully supportive of the Bush agenda were assured. An outpouring of protest from the predominantly Shia areas of the country, led by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, forced CPA administrators to move on to an election-based strategy.

The first election in January 2005 delivered a sizeable parliamentary majority voted in on platforms calling for strict timetables for a full U.S. military withdrawal from the country. American representatives then forcefully pressured the newly installed cabinet to abandon this position.

The second parliamentary election in December 2005 followed a similar pattern. This time, the backroom bargaining was only partially effective. The newly installed prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, reneged on his campaign promises by publicly supporting an ongoing American military presence, which caused deep fissures in the ruling coalition. After a year of unproductive negotiations, the 30 Sadrists in parliament, originally a key part of Maliki's ruling coalition, withdrew from both that coalition and the cabinet in protest over the prime minister's refusal to set a date for the end of the occupation. Subsequent parliamentary demands for a date certain for withdrawal were ignored by both the government and U.S. officials. While Maliki continued in office without a parliamentary majority, the controversy contributed to the soaring popularity of the Sadrists and waning support for the other Shiite governing parties.

By early 2008, with provincial elections looming in November, there was little doubt that the Sadrists would sweep to power in many predominantly Shia provinces, most critically Basra, Iraq's second largest city and southern oil hub. To prevent this debacle, Iraqi government troops, supported and advised by the U.S. military, sought to expel the Sadrists from key areas of Basra.

This use of military force to prevent electoral defeat was only one of many indications that the Iraqi government was feeling the pressure of public opinion. Another was the reluctance of Prime Minister Maliki to maintain an antagonistic stance toward Iran. Despite fervent Bush administration efforts, his government has promoted social, religious, and economic relationships between Iraqis and Iranians. These included facilitating visits to the holy cities of Karbala and Najaf by hundreds of thousands of Iranian Shia pilgrims, as well as supporting extensive oil transactions between Basra and Iranian firms, including distribution and refining services that promised to integrate the two energy economies. A formal military relationship between the two countries was vetoed by U.S. authorities, but this did not reverse the tide of cooperation.


The River of Resistance
As the occupation wore on, the Bush administration found itself swimming against a tide of resistance of a previously unimaginable sort, and ever further from its goals. Today, cities and towns around the country are largely under the sway of Shia or Sunni militias which, even when trained or paid by the occupation, remain militantly opposed to the U.S. presence. Moreover, though the prostrate Iraqi economy has been formally privatized, these local militias - and the political leaders they worked with - continue to raise demands for vast government-funded reconstruction and economic development programs.

The formal political leadership of Iraq, locked inside the heavily fortified, U.S.-controlled Green Zone in Baghdad, remains publicly compliant when it comes to Bush administration plans to transform Iraq into a Middle Eastern outpost - including the continued presence of American troops on a series of mega-bases in the heart of the country. The rest of the government bureaucracy and the bulk of Iraq's grass roots are increasingly insistent on an early American departure date and a full-scale reversal of the economic policies first introduced by the occupation.

In Washington, for Democratic as well as Republican politicians, the outpost idea remains at the heart of the policy agenda for Iraq in this election year, along with a neoliberal economy featuring a modernized oil sector in which multinational firms are to use state-of-the-art technology to maximize the country's lagging oil production.

Iraqi resistance of every kind and on every level has, however, prevented this vision from becoming reality. Because of the Iraqis, the glorious sounding Global War on Terror has been transformed into an endless, hopeless actual war.

But the Iraqis have paid a terrible price for resisting. The invasion and the social and economic policies that accompanied it have destroyed Iraq, leaving its people essentially destitute. In the first five years of this endless war, Iraqis have suffered more for resisting than if they had accepted and endured American military and economic dominance. Whether consciously or not, they have sacrificed themselves to halt Washington's projected military and economic march through the oil-rich Middle East on the path to a new American Century that now will never be.

It is past time for the rest of the world to shoulder at least a small share of the burden of resistance. Just as the worldwide protests before the war were among the upstream sources of the Iraqi resistance-to-come, so now others, especially Americans, should resist the very idea that Iraq could ever become the headquarters for a permanent United States presence that would, in the words of Bush speechwriter David Frum, "put America more wholly in charge of the region than any power since the Ottomans, or maybe even the Romans." Unlike the Iraqis, after all, the citizens of the United States are uniquely positioned to bury this imperial dream for all time.

Michael Schwartz, Professor of Sociology at Stony Brook University has written extensively on popular protest and insurgency. His analyses of America's Iraq have appeared regularly at Tomdispatch.com, as well as Asia Times, Mother Jones, and Contexts. His forthcoming Tomdispatch book, War Without End: The Iraq Debacle in Context (Haymarket, June 2008) explores how the militarized geopolitics of oil led the U.S. to dismantle the Iraqi state and economy while fueling a sectarian civil war. His email address is Ms42@optonline.net.
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.~~~~~THE PRICE OF SURVIVAL
What Would It Cost to Save Nature?
By
Philip Bethge,
Rafaela von Bredow
and
Christian Schwägerl
SPIEGEL ONLINE
05/23/2008 06:41 PM

How much is the Earth worth to us? At a global conference in Bonn, Germany, representatives of 191 nations are discussing a revolution in conservation. By making a highly profitable business out of saving forests, whales and coral reefs, environmentalists hope to put a stop to a dramatic wave of extinctions.

The envoy from Europe can hardly believe his eyes. Butterflies the size of dessert plates are fluttering around his nose. Orchids hang in cascades from towering trees. Hornbills sail across the treetops. The tropical air is filled with the saturated scent of growth and proliferation.

Biologists have already tracked down more than 10,000 plant and 400 mammal species in the Congo basin. These plants and animals are part of the world's second-largest uninterrupted rainforest, one of the planet's most potent carbon storage systems. Indeed, it is for precisely this reason that Hans Schipulle, 63, is tramping around in the wilderness near the Sangha River on a humid morning in the Central African Republic.


"This forest stores carbon dioxide, and thus helps to slow down global warming. It regulates the global water supply and holds valuable pharmaceuticals," says Schipulle, a veteran environmentalist who works for the German government. "We must finally realize that these are services that are worth something to us."

Schipulle is in the region on a sensitive mission. Since December, he has headed the Congo Basin Forest Partnership (CBFP), a group founded by Americans, Europeans and the countries along the Congo River. The alliance aims to prevent the Congo basin from being plundered and transformed into oil palm and coffee plantations by mid-century. The Congo rainforest is still largely in one piece, but investors from around the world have already discovered the region's potential for big business -- ore, diamonds, plantations and lumber. But Schipulle and his partners have other plans for the Congo basin. They want international financial institutions or the world community to fork over money to preserve the rainforest as it is today. The threat of clear-cutting poses a double risk for the world. First, destroying the Congo rainforest would eliminate one of the earth's most important cooling systems. Second, the carbon dioxide (CO2) released as a result of slash-and-burn agriculture would further accelerate global warming.

Bayanga, a nearby village, is living proof of the traditional conflict between protecting the environment and fighting poverty. Until recently, its residents benefited from the destruction of the rainforest. A sawmill in Bayanga provided employment for 370 people, but the mill was shut down after Schipulle and his alliance presented an urgent appeal to the government in the capital Bangui to prevent a dubious logging company from being allowed to overexploit 4,520 square kilometers (1,745 square miles) of forest.

It was a small victory for nature, but village residents still need work and income. An eco-tourism project sponsored by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and the German Society for Technical Cooperation (GTZ) has created jobs for only 94 people so far, providing the community with about €10,000 ($15,500) in annual revenue -- but not enough to reduce poverty.

How can Schipulle explain to the people of Bayanga what their forest means for the rest of the world? Is it really possible that eco-tourism, environmentally responsible forestry and coffee plantations along the fringe of the future protected forest regions will be capable of feeding the men, women and children of the village?


An Emissions Trading Market for the Congo Rainforest

Schipulle firmly believes in this vision. The World Bank already plans to incorporate the entire Congo basin into its Forest Carbon Partnership program. The Washington-based organization wants to enter the emissions trading market with the CO2 stored by the Congo rainforest. Because deforestation in tropical regions is responsible for about 20 percent of climate change, protecting the forest is synonymous with protecting the climate -- and the world community is increasingly willing to pay a lot of money to make that happen.

The possible rescue of the Congo rainforest is only one of many examples. A new age of conservation is dawning. For the first time, a value is being assigned to forests, plants and coral reefs, a value that makes them worthy of protection. It is nothing short of a paradigm shift in the environmental movement.

Romantic notions about nature and the environment aside, governments, conservationists and scientists are posing new questions, the answers to which will shape the future of mankind: How much is the Earth worth? Can the value of its diversity be quantified? How much should taking inventory of the planet be worth to us? Finally, who should foot the bill for decades of mismanagement at nature's expense?

Officials from around the world are currently addressing these crucial concerns at a United Nations conference on bio-diversity in Bonn, Germany. Representatives from 191 nations and roughly 250 environmental, conservation and development aid organizations are focusing on ways to stop the loss of species and natural habitats. Dozens of draft resolutions, many of them controversial despite being formulated in the dry language of international diplomacy, are under review. Even the name of the gathering belies its importance: the Ninth Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity.

At issue in Bonn is no less than the future of the planet and man's dramatic failure to leave a livable earth to his children. Wilderness, species, habitats and ecosystems are disappearing at an unprecedented rate. From one day to the next, human beings wipe out between three and 130 species, depending on which estimate you go by. Each year, virgin forest one-and-a-half times the size of Switzerland falls victim to logging. Moors are disappearing, rivers are being forced into concrete channels and erosion is transforming mountainsides into wasteland.


A Nail in the Coffin for the Amazon Rainforest?

Agriculture is taking up an ever larger portion of the Earth, especially now that plants are no longer grown solely as food, but also -- like sugar cane and oil palm -- to produce biofuel. Just last week, German Chancellor Angela Merkel signed an energy agreement in Brasilia with Brazilian President Lula da Silva. Under the agreement, Brazil can continue to supply Germany with biofuel as long as it complies with certain environmental standards. But for many environmental protection groups, the deal is merely another nail in the coffin for the Amazon rainforest.

In addition, the destruction of nature and global warming tend to reinforce one another. When sea levels rise and mangrove forests disappear, coastlines become more exposed to the elements than ever before. As carbon dioxide continues to acidify the oceans, the calcium structures of corals, snails and mussels become brittle.

At issue is the survival of exotic species like the red-headed vulture, the Banggai cardinalfish, the Gulf of California harbor porpoise, the Santa Catalina rattlesnake and the Indian gharial. But the survival of mankind as a species is also at stake, as the example of the recent cyclone in Burma illustrates. If the mangrove forests that once protected the Burmese coastline had been intact, the flooding would likely have been much less devastating.


Without corals, many types of fish would not exist, because reefs protect fish as they mature. The flora and fauna of the oceans hold potential cancer drugs worth, according to economists' estimates, as much as $1 billion (€645 million) a year.

Many of the things humanity considers costly and desirable are also part of biodiversity, such as turbot fillets, teak garden furniture and caviar from Russian sturgeon. But we also value the song of the nightingale, the scent of lilac, a view of untamed mountains, empty meadows and dense jungles.

The parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), well aware of these riches, hope to "significantly" slow down the loss of eco-systems and species by 2010. But what exactly does this "sufficiently fuzzy objective" mean, Jochen Flasbarth, head of nature protection at Germany's Environment Ministry (BMU) asks sarcastically?

At the Bonn conference, about 6,000 experts are debating exactly that question. Ideally, they will bring meaning to what might otherwise be empty words and phrases, but in the worst case scenario the conference will end in little more than bland declarations of intent. The parties can only adopt resolutions in consensus, and there are no mechanisms to apply pressure to obstructionists.

Despite the potential difficulties, some of the approaches being taken at the conference are at least promising:
.One of the goals is to create a global network of sanctuaries with representative habitats.
.Using the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as a model, the delegates hope to establish a panel of experts for the biodiversity convention that brings together representatives of the scientific and political communities.
.The agenda calls for the fair balancing of interests between developing countries, with their abundant diversity, and the industrialized nations, which want to exploit these resources.
.The experts intend to search for new mechanisms to pay for the protection of diversity. Without new sources of funding, all negotiation can be nothing but empty talk.

"This conference deals with economic interests," says German Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel. According to Gabriel, it is critical that we assign "a measurable cost to the loss (of environment)," or else we run the risk "of deleting data from nature's hard drive." Chancellor Merkel has already indicated that she will announce a significant increase in German government funding for the protection of the world's forests when she appears at the conference next Wednesday. Norway, which invests $500 million (€323 million) a year, is her benchmark. Back home, the government in Berlin is urging German states, responsible for domestic environmental protection issues, to allow 10 percent of forests owned by states and municipalities to return to nature.

Environment Minister Gabriel also plans to present the initial results of a study, initiated in collaboration with the European Union, on the global costs of species and habitat loss. According to an excerpt SPIEGEL has obtained of the document -- titled "The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity" -- the loss of biodiversity costs the world 6 percent of global gross domestic product. Poor countries are the hardest-hit. The annual cost of species and habitat loss amounts to as much as half of their already modest economic strength.

"Protecting diversity is much cheaper than allowing its destruction," says Indian economist Pavan Sukhdev, who Gabriel and EU Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas convinced to head the study. Biodiversity -- and efforts to preserve it -- could in fact become an enormous business in the future. The new conservationists hope to sell intact forests because they store the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2). They also expect to see drugs developed from creatures like the cone snail and corals produce handsome profits in the future. The last oases of diversity are also expected to attract more and more well-heeled eco-tourists.

"Bonn has to push for a breakthrough," says Achim Steiner, the head of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP). To this day, according to Steiner, the promises made at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro 16 years ago, where both the Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Convention on Biological Diversity were born, have "not been kept or have been systematically broken."

Biodiversity is more than just the diversity of plant and animal species. It also encompasses the entire cornucopia of habitats, as well as the genetic information that lies hidden, as a biological treasure, in many organisms that have yet to be studied. Experts estimate that the planet's inventory includes between 10 and 20 million species of animals, plants, fungi and microbes. This diversity is not evenly distributed, however. Life is concentrated in so-called hot spots, which include regions like the Mediterranean coast, the tropical Andes and the Philippines.

And the future of diversity is not bright. Take Germany, for example. According to a study published in April by the German Federal Agency for Nature Conservation (BfN), titled "Facts about Nature 2008," 36 percent of all animal species studied in Germany are threatened. More than two-thirds of German habitats are considered threatened. Nature reserves make up only 3.3 percent of the country's land mass. Every day, 113 hectares (279 acres) of land disappear under asphalt and concrete.

The global situation is equally alarming. Last year, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) red listed 16,297 plant and animal species as threatened, including almost a third of all amphibians, one in eight bird species and almost one-fourth of all mammal species. To develop its list, the IUCNB evaluated more than 41,000 species. The ones on its threatened list make up close to 40 percent of the total.


"A Sixth Global Mass Exctinction Has Begun"

To make matters worse, the rate of decline is formidable. A current UNEP estimate concludes that species are becoming extinct 100 times faster today than would normally occur as a result of evolution.

"A sixth global mass extinction has begun," says UNEP Executive Director Steiner. The diversity of species has already been severely compromised five times in the past in the wake of meteorite collisions, volcanic eruptions and rising sea levels. But today it is the more than 6.6 billion people that are destroying nature at an unprecedented pace. They hunt and fish at uncontrolled rates. They transform more and more land into farmland to fill their bellies. They chop down the last virgin forests to produce biofuel for their automobiles. They pollute the water, the soil and the air with toxic substances. And they drag species from one part of the earth to another -- with sometimes devastating consequences.


Ascribing a Monetary Value to Nature

Man's footprint on the globe is growing inexorably. And Homo sapiens, the supposedly perceptive human race, have failed miserably to secure the Earth's biological diversity. But now a revolution is taking shape in the way we think, as environmentalists and economists discover the marketplace of nature. They are putting their heads together to translate the achievements of mangroves and nightshade, whales, moors and rainforests into monetary value. Under this new mindset, destroying nature will no longer be profitable while protecting it will. Pavan Sukhdev, the director of the joint German-EU study on biodiversity, considers this the obvious solution. It is now or never, says Sukhdev, that "the economic weapon must shoot in the right direction."


On a recent spring morning, the 48-year-old Indian pointed to the concrete wasteland of Berlin's Alexanderplatz square. "That's how desolate the entire earth will be if we don't succeed," says Sukhdev, who also heads the global markets division at Deutsche Bank's Indian office in Mumbai. Ten years ago, he says, a friend asked him the following question: "You're a banker. So tell me, why are some things worth something while others are not?" While searching for an answer to her question, he hit upon the idea of calculating prices for forests, wetlands and the courses of rivers.

Sukhdev's calculations, ridiculed at first, have since become the driving force behind the conservation revolution. Economists now perform detailed calculations to reflect what diversity does for people. Bees, for instance, are worth $2 to $8 billion (€1.3 to €5.2 billion) a year, because they pollinate important crop plants worldwide. Reeds growing along riverbanks are also considered valuable. Along the central part of Germany's Elbe River, for example, they are responsible for €7.7 million ($11.9 million) in annual savings, because they filter the water, thereby eliminating the need to build additional sewage treatment plants.

On the coast of Pakistan's Beluchistan Province, one hectare (2.47 acres) of intact mangrove forest produces the equivalent of about $2,200 (€1,420) in annual income. The ecosystem is a breeding ground for economically attractive fish species, as well as acting as a protective wall against flooding. Salt marshes in Scotland are worth about €1,000 ($1,555) per hectare to the region's mussel industry.

Tourists visiting Germany's Müritz National Park to marvel at sea eagles, ospreys, cranes and red deer contribute €13 million ($20 million) in annual revenue. In Britain, a team of researchers working with conservation biologist Andrew Balmford has calculated that a global network of protected areas could produce about $5 billion (€3.2 billion) in annual revenue. The group's calculations reflected the reserves' economic benefits for tourism, climate protection, nutrient cycles and the water supply.

If the destruction of natural habitats continues unabated, even the key to the earth's future energy supply could go undiscovered. US geneticist Craig Venter has collected thousands of samples of microorganisms living in seawater during voyages on his yacht, the Sorcerer II. Venter hopes that the samples will contain genetic sequences that could be used to produce fuels for cars and airplanes in the future.

In 1997, American ecological economist Robert Costanza estimated the annual value of the services nature provides for mankind at $33 trillion, a figure that was 1.8 times the world GNP at the time.


A Shift in Thinking
Despite their enormity, these numbers have been of little use to species and ecosystems in the past, because few have been willing to pay money for nature's assets. Indeed, the world's powerful corporations continue to treat animals, plants, forests, rivers and wetlands as a free resource. But at least some industries seem to be approaching an important watershed moment.

For instance, companies already earn $43 billion (€28 billion) in annual revenues with plant-based natural remedies. The active agents in 10 of the world's 25 most successful drugs were originally derived from fungi, bacteria, plants and animals living in the wild. The precursors of aspirin came from willow bark and meadowsweet. The purple foxglove plant is the source of the agent in the heart drug digitoxin.

Companies spend billions searching for the next mega-drugs derived from nature's diverse sources. But does nature get anything out of the bargain? Initial models show that it can. In Costa Rica, for example, there is already a tradition to the search for miracle drugs from the jungle. The Instituto Nacional de Biodiversidad (INBio) was founded in the capital San José in 1989. In the 1990s the pharmaceutical company Merck invested $4 million (€2.6 million) in the research institute, which has since acquired a global reputation. Merck executives pledged to donate 10 percent of the profits of potential discoveries to the country, with part of the proceeds to be earmarked for conservation.

Do Costa Rica's butterflies, forest plants and slime molds hold the key to new drugs to fight malaria and cancer, or can they at least provide the ingredients for new skin creams and anti-dandruff shampoos? World-renowned researchers at INBio continue to seek answers to these questions, constantly hunting for useful natural substances.

On a recent morning, for example, fungus specialist Jorge Blanco was carefully scrutinizing the leaves of Monimiaceae siparuna, a plant that resembles the laurel family. Using a scalpel, he cut apart the precious green leaves and placed the pieces into dishes of culture medium. Soon fungi that previously thrived only inside the leaves would sprout. To get the plant Diego Vargas, a biologist working at INBio, spent two hours on the previous day in an SUV, driving the winding roads in the Parque Nacional Braulio Carrillo along the slopes of the Barva volcano.


Vargas, wearing a baseball cap, a white T-shirt and blue rubber gloves, photographs plants in the virgin forest, then uses garden shears to snip off the seed heads of various plants and carefully places them in bags. Peering into the undergrowth, he finds Monimiaceae siparuna, a plant with tiny yellowish blossoms. He twirls his garden shears like a cowboy wielding his Colt, then deftly cuts off the seed heads: a small snip for Vargas, but could it be a giant snip for mankind?

"Many of the fungi that live in the leaves of this plant have never been studied, because they are so hard to isolate," says Vargas. "They may very well produce many interesting substances with which we aren't even familiar yet."

Since INBio was established in the late 1980s, its scientists have examined thousands of insects in their quest for useful natural substances. Nowadays, the high-tech equipment at the institute's special laboratory in Heredia, a San José suburb, is used mainly to analyze plant extracts, microbes and fungi.

The great bio-boom has not materialized yet, prompting Merck and a few other major investors to withdraw their funding. "The pharmaceutical companies no longer want to pay for the long process that is needed to find promising substances in nature," says Giselle Tamayo, technical coordinator of INBio’s biodiversity prospecting division.


Sharing the Blessings, While Protecting Biodiversity
Nevertheless, Tamayo insists that the research facility, which now works primarily with universities, is still "a model of success." The institute, says Tamayo, helps to demonstrate how developing countries can share in the blessings of biotechnology while simultaneously protecting their own biodiversity. A share of the licensing fees INBio receives goes into protecting Costa Rican forests.

Costa Rica is already considered a model country within the international conservation movement. In the country's booming ecotourism industry, about 1.5 million tourists spend close to $1.5 billion (€970 million) a year to visit the natural wonders of Costa Rica's rainforests and montane forests. And protecting those forests has been elevated to a national doctrine in Costa Rica. In the 1970s and 1980s, loggers cleared almost 80 percent of the Costa Rican rainforest. Today more than half of the country is forested once again.

In the southern part of the country, the densely forested Osa Peninsula juts out into the Pacific. Deep in the jungle, in the mountains above the tiny village of Golfito, Jorge Marin Picado keeps watch over 46 hectares (114 acres) of primeval forest. A flock of pale red Aras flies over the site, where the smell of rotting vegetation fills the air. Lianas snake their way up giant trees. Picado, wearing the standard machete in his belt, is the manager of the finca, or farm, perched along the edge of the coastal range. Under an agreement the farm's owner has signed with the Costa Rican forestry agency, the government pays him $350 (€225) per hectare each year to keep the forest undisturbed and prevent anyone from stealing plants or illegally cutting down trees.


Rewarding Farmers for Keeping Trees Untouched
The government calls the system its "Environmental Services" program, and conservationists consider it exemplary. Under the program, the government rewards landowners for planting new trees or leaving existing forest untouched. "We want to enlarge the forest area and offer farmers an alternative," says Katia Alegria of the forestry agency. As a result, pastureland where cattle have grazed until now is becoming forest once again. Instead of oil palms and banana trees, species like teak and the local ron-ron tree are growing in the new and preserved forests.

The program is funded with taxes on the sale of gasoline and funds from the World Bank and the Global Environment Facility, into which the CBD member states pay. But Costa Rica also hopes to turn a profit in the future from the carbon dioxide captured by trees.

Indeed, the ability to capture enormous amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere and store it could ultimately be forests' lifeline in this era when man is desperately searching for ways to halt global warming. Bogs can also bind substantial amounts of CO2. Restoring and preserving them "offers a cost-effective way of curbing climate change and protecting diversity," says UNEP Executive Director Steiner. This is also an opportunity for Germany. Researchers at Greifswald University have calculated that restoring one hectare of lowland bog in Germany and allowing the native alder forest to grow results in the capture of 30 tons of CO2 a year.

The governments of countries with large tropical rainforests, like Guyana, Indonesia, Brazil and Papua-New Guinea, have become especially enthusiastic advocates of the revolutionary idea of selling their forests as greenhouse gas sinks. If the plan works, they could rake in billions in profits, which in turn could be spent on protecting forests.


A New Currency for Environmentalism

The currency in the new environmental age is called a "forest certificate," and a potential market for the green money already exists. In the EU emissions trading system, for example, industrial corporations and energy utilities are allocated carbon dioxide pollution rights known as CO2 certificates. They define how much carbon dioxide a given company's factories are permitted to emit into the atmosphere. If a company's CO2 emissions exceed its allocated limit, it must buy additional certificates to offset the difference. Unused pollution rights can be sold. In other words, the certificates have a real monetary value, which is currently at €25 ($39) per ton of CO2, but could increase to €60 ($93) in the future.


DER SPIEGEL
Graphic: How Forest Certificates Work
The tropical rainforest countries are keenly interested in entering this growing market. At the next UN Climate Change Conference, in Copenhagen in 2009, the course could be set for the development of a market in forest certificates. Large electric utilities, like Germany's RWE, are already waiting in the wings. "Forests as a part of a global emissions trading system would be of interest to us," says Michael Fübi, the company's climate protection manager. The company would benefit by satisfying climate protection requirements more quickly and at a lower cost than through the installation of costly new technologies. In the medium term, however, this could not serve as a replacement for modernizing power plants, says Fübi.

How much money this forest certificate system would ultimately generate is still written in the stars. Experts estimate that it would cost $10 billion (€6.45 billion) a year to truly benefit the world's forests. Otherwise it would be far more profitable for tropical countries to cut down their forests for lumber.

"Logging produces from $100 to $500 million (€65 to €322 million) a year in revenues for Papua-New Guinea," says Kevin Conrad, Papua-New Guinea's special envoy for climate protection and conservation, highlighting the country's dilemma. The country has to be offered more than this amount to make protecting its forests an attractive proposition, "otherwise the forest will be gone -- and it'll happen very soon."


Turning Canopies into Capital
In Brazil, the chainsaw is still winning out over conservation. Almost 20 percent of the country's 3.65 million square kilometers (1.41 million square miles) of Amazon rainforest have already been cut down and turned into pastureland and soybean fields. After taking office in 2003, Brazilian Environment Minister Marina Silva managed to reduce the rate of deforestation from 28,000 to 12,000 square kilometers (10,810 to 4,633 square miles) a year. She introduced new rules that allowed owners of forests to log on no more than 20 percent of their property, and imposed a credit freeze on violators. But last week Silva, an icon of the global forest protection movement, made the surprising announcement that she was resigning, saying that she was tired of "playing the green fig leaf" for President Lula da Silva.

As it happens, dead forests are more valuable than living forests on global markets, and it will take a lot of money to reverse this. There are, however, a few initial success stories. The World Bank, for example, has introduced its Forest Carbon Partnership, a program designed to protect both the climate and the environment simultaneously. One of the partnership's model projects could soon be that of Germany's Hans Schipulle, who hopes to transform the Congo basin rainforest into a cash cow.

In anticipation of a growing market for forest certificates, the US investment bank Merrill Lynch recently agreed to pay Indonesia's Aceh Province $9 million (€5.8 million) a year for four years to protect the rainforest in its Ulu Masen preserve. Canopy Capital, a London-based company, has spent a sum numbering in the millions to secure the value that it believes Guyana's Iwokrama rainforest could soon have for mankind. Canopy's managing director, Hylton Murray-Philipson, explains the concept: "No one would pay anything for the intact forest today, but I believe that it is extremely likely that markets will soon take a different view of the value of nature." Experts predict that the trade in the natural assets of forests, bogs and reefs could translate into $10 billion (€6.5 billion) in revenues by 2010.

Can such global financial transfers truly bring about change? "Once CO2 trading translates into large amounts of money, the question that inevitably arises is who actually owns the forest," says Tom Griffiths, who is with the human rights organization Forest Peoples Programme. "Is it the investors or the people who live in the forest?"


Future Power Struggles over Carbon Sinks

Griffiths fears that a highly profitable forest protection system could lead to power struggles over lucrative carbon sinks, which in turn would translate into more corruption, speculation, land grabs and conflicts. The logging company Asia Pacific Resources International, for example, clears forests and drains peat bogs in Indonesia to plant new tree plantations. Suddenly the company has launched a CO2 pilot project in which it plans to restore a few bogs. But the project smacks of an eco-scam, too, because Asia Pacific will only be able to pocket profits from CO2 trading as a result of the fact that it destroyed large swathes of the ecosystem in the first place.

To secure biological diversity in the long term, the parties to the Biodiversity Convention are also promoting classic methods of conservation. There are roughly 100,000 nature reserves around the globe. According to a recent study by the WWF, the world community spends $6.5 to $10 billion (€4.2 to €6.5 billion) a year on protected areas. This sounds like a lot of money, but in fact is well short of what is needed.

Experts estimate that at least twice as much will be required to protect nature in the long term. Professional environment police officers must monitor the reserves. Education is critical in helping local populations find new ways to live in harmony with nature. Microloans are needed to help people implement new business models compatible with the natural environment.


Connecting Countries that are Biodiversity Rich with those with Deep Pockets
But one of the most immediate goals should be to establish additional reserves in the world's biodiversity hot spots. BMU conservation strategist Flasbarth has high hopes for a German initiative called LifeWeb. The program is designed to bring together countries with great biodiversity and those with deep pockets.

"Every country can use the system to specify which areas it would protect, and at what price. The hope is that interested parties will then bid for the right to pay for conservation," says Flasbarth. The Democratic Republic of Congo, for example, is traveling to the Bonn conference with an offer to place 140,000 square kilometers (54,054 square miles) of rainforest under protection. But will it be able to attract investors for the project?

The CBD member states plan to place 10 percent of all the earth's land-based ecosystems under protection by 2010, as well as 10 percent of the ocean surface by 2012. It is a bold plan. The goal could be reached on land, albeit with great effort. But achieving such a goal in the oceans is pure illusion. Strict protections have only been applied to less than 1 percent of the world's oceans to date. Indeed, the oceans are where international conservation and species protection efforts have failed most markedly.


Declining Fish Stocks
Some experts estimate that if the current trend of overfishing continues, commercial ocean fishing will have become all but impossible by 2050. Meanwhile, the countries of the world pay more than €20 billion ($31 billion) a year to subsidize the fishing industry -- and in doing so they pay for one in five fish caught in the world. Around the globe, there are about 4 million fishing boats routinely hunting down all manner of sea creatures. Experts say that to prevent the destruction of current populations, the global fishing fleet would have to be cut in half.

Overfishing threatens to destroy entire ecosystems. According to the UN Millennium Ecosystem Assessment study, 20 percent of the world's coral reefs have already been destroyed, while another 20 percent are severely compromised. The heavy equipment used by trawlers is destroying coral banks in the northeast Atlantic. Deep-sea fishermen are steadily scraping away at the unique natural wonders of underwater mountains.

"Imagine if hunters were to cut down entire forests to catch a few deer," says Carl Gustaf Lundin, head of the IUCN's Global Marine Program, "people would be outraged." But this is precisely the sort of devastation caused by the use of trawl nets, Lundin explains. "Many people have no concept of the destruction of the oceans."

Zoologists demand tighter controls on board trawlers to limit illegal fishing. Most of all, they hope to see the establishment of zones where fishing would be banned completely. The concept they envision would involve zones of intensive fishing alternating with these protected regions, where young fish could grow to maturity undisturbed and populations could recover. The international community is still hesitant when it comes to establishing marine reserves and few laws govern the high seas. But opinions are gradually changing when it comes to the territorial waters of nations.


A Plan for the Caribbean
The goal of an initiative currently taking shape in the Caribbean, for example, is to place 20 percent of all ecosystems in the Caribbean Sea under protection by 2020. At issue are 5 million hectares (12.35 million acres) of waters complete with shimmering coral reefs, dense mangrove forests and so-called Blue Holes, often circular, underwater sinkholes inside atolls that can be up to 200 meters (656 feet) deep.

Details of the ambitious program, known as the Caribbean Challenge Marine Initiative, will be presented in Bonn next week. The countries that have signed on so far include the Bahamas, Grenada, the Dominican Republic, as well as St. Vincent and the Grenadines. Conservation groups like the US-based Nature Conservancy (TNC) are also involved. The effort centers around conservation funds, the proceeds of which would pay for rangers, patrol boats, research and environmental education.

"The funding must be secured for the long term, otherwise the entire idea will fail after a few years for lack of funds," says Eleanor Phillips, the director of TNC's Northern Caribbean program. She helps run the project from her office in Nassau, the capital of the Bahamas. The city is on New Providence, one of the islands in the Bahamas archipelago. The conservation problems faced by groups like TNC are concentrated on a few square kilometers in Nassau.

Tourists, especially from the United States, routinely overrun the city. They live in concrete hotels or gated residential communities. Entire mangrove forests, says Philips, are cleared to make room for the houses of the rich. But the forests are breeding grounds for many Caribbean fish species. Every day in Nassau harbor, fishing boats bring in tons of Nassau grouper and Caribbean queen conch, which are then hawked as island specialties in every snack bar.


The two species were once abundant. The tropical waters used to be filled with enormous schools of Nassau grouper. Within hours, fishermen would bring up hundreds of the large fish, which can weigh up to 25 kilos (55 lbs.). The queen conch was so plentiful that islanders could gather an entire evening meal by snorkeling in the azure-blue ocean for a few minutes. Now, fishermen like Eudie Rolle, often to be found sitting on a quay in Nassau harbor behind a table covered with the tasty sea snails, are left to complain about how difficult the beautiful pink shells are to find. Rolle has been fishing for 57 years. "In the past," he says, "all we had to do was gather the conch in waist-high water. But now my sons have to sail 150 miles out to find any."

"We are very concerned," says Michael Braynen of the island nation's Department of Marine Resources. "In the long term, we need to reduce the number of fishermen in the Bahamas. But then we have to offer them alternatives."


Balancing Nature Protection with Livelihoods

This is the underlying problem. Those who seek to effectively protect nature, make ocean zones off-limits and allow forests to remain untouched must ensure that the people who have depended on these facets of nature for their livelihoods are given new opportunities. The solution in the Bahamas is called ecotourism.

Andros is a short, 15-minute flight from Nassau. The island, roughly 170 kilometers (106 miles) long, is home to about 8,000 people and the world's third-largest barrier reef lies off its eastern coast. Islanders like Peter Douglas take the island's few tourists on tours of the colorful, luminescent coral banks and undersea bluffs. Enterprising islanders have developed eco-lodges in the bush behind the coast. Prescott Smith, for example, offers fly-fishing vacations for wealthy business executives. For $1,600 (€1,030) a day, his customers can learn to elegantly cast their flies in the island's mangrove swamps for longfin bonefish or Atlantic tarpon. But instead of keeping their catch, they adhere to a "catch and release" policy.

The islanders are defending their small paradise against investors in mass tourism. They have found ways to profit from nature without destroying it. "Scientists, governments and the big conservation groups are fighting the locals," says Prescott Smith. "They come here and say: You're the problem." But true conservation, according to Smith, must incorporate the local population. "Only if the people here truly get the feeling that their own interests are at stake will they protect the country."

Indeed, even as the world gathers to discuss the CBD, such small-scale, bottom up projects may be the world's best hope. Such a grassroots approach is especially valid in places where poverty is widespread. The poor have no other choice but to live from the resources of nature and, if necessary, to destroy them. This too is an issue that will be discussed at the Bonn conference in the coming days.

Most of all, however, the CBD partners must attempt to establish a focus for the next two years. The 10th Conference of the Parties of the CBD takes place in 2010, presumably in Japan. By then, the group hopes to have implemented many of its ambitious environmental goals.

"In Bonn, it is especially important that the parties do not block one another on the major issues," says BMU conservation director Flasbarth. The sticking points are predictable. When the CBD came into being, for example, many of the parties wanted to see mechanisms established to ensure a fair balancing of benefits among industrialized and developing nations. The idea was that everyone ought to be able to benefit from the planet's genetic treasures. At the same time, the parties argued, the populations of the countries in which the profitable species originate should also share in the profits.

But it has been 16 years since the Rio Earth Summit took place, and still, rules to address this problem have yet to be established. The developing countries are suspicious, because bio-pirates have already hijacked parts of their biological treasures. In early May, for example, it was reported that residents of the South African village of Alice are challenging two patents, held by the German company Dr. Willmar Schwabe Arzneimittel, for the production of the drug Umckaloabo. Umckaloabo is made from the roots of the Capeland pelargonium. The locals claim that they have been preparing tinctures from the plant for centuries and using them to treat colds.

They claim that ased on this knowledge, Spitzner, a subsidiary of Schwabe, now produces Umckaloabo. "The patents are illegal and must be revoked," says Mariam Mayet of the African Centre for Biosafety. Besides, says Mayet, the company owes the people of Alice a share of profits.

Another bone of contention is the biofuel boom. German Chancellor Merkel did little to ease tensions when she recently signed an energy treaty with Brazilian President Lula da Silva. The Brazilians see German concern for the Amazon rainforest as an attempt to corner the biofuels market. To produce bio-ethanol, they plan to have planted sugarcane in an area almost as large as Great Britain by 2025. "If we tell the Brazilians that we're boycotting this, the negotiations over rainforest protection will come to an abrupt end," warns German Environment Minister Gabriel. Merely the attempt to place the topic of bio-energy on the agenda at the Bonn conference was met with indignation in Brasilia.


The Pricetag of Curtainling Exctinction: €30 billion

In short, a high level of diplomatic skill will be needed in Bonn to advance to the core issue: Who will pay how much and for what? The annual cost of curtailing species extinction by 2010 is estimated at €30 billion ($46.5 billion). The EU heads of state are even more ambitious and want to put a complete stop to the loss of biodiversity in Europe by 2010. However, the WWF believes that this goal can only be reached "at a significant additional cost."

Mastering the crisis will likely require a wide range of funding models. Focusing on biodiversity as a source for new drugs and cosmetics is one possibility, the trade in CO2 certificates is another. Private sponsors can also have an important impact. The conservation group TNC, for example, manages a fortune of $5.4 billion (€3.5 billion), some of it donated by wealthy patrons. In 2007 alone, TNC spent $566 million (€365 million) to purchase land and protect it for future generations.

Others have chosen to engage in something akin to colonial megalomania and personally control the fate of nature. Patagonia, for example, appears to be firmly in the hands of billionaires. For years, Douglas and Kris Tompkins, the co-founders of the apparel companies North Face and Patagonia, have owned several thousand square kilometers of untouched wilderness in the region. Some of their neighbors are speculator George Soros, fashion magnates Luciano and Carlo Benetton, actors Sharon Stone and Christopher Lambert, and CNN founder Ted Turner.

The not-quite-fabulously-rich can acquire tropical islands or hectare-sized pieces of wild animal corridors through organizations like TNC or World Land Trust.

Economist Pavan Sukhdev also recommends levying, in addition to the value-added tax, a kind of value reduction tax in wealthy countries -- a way of compensating for the environmental damage associated with the production of a car or a refrigerator. The revenues from such a tax could flow directly into large-scale conservation projects.

Sukhdev also wants to force companies and consumers to assume more responsibility. "A coffee company could charge a small surcharge and invest the money in the rainforest next to its plantations," he says. When it comes to organic food, consumers are already prepared to pay a premium today. "So why not create an Eco-Plus label to test whether they are willing to pay an additional premium to fund conservation projects?"

Nowadays, people can already make their travel climate-neutral by offsetting the emissions from aircraft or rental cars through companies like the German firm global-woods. The company uses the revenues to support reforestation programs in Argentina, Paraguay and Uganda. Another example is the Marriott hotel chain. The company has paid $2 million (€1.3 million) to the Brazilian state of Amazonas to protect the 589,000-hectare (1.45 million-acre) Juma preserve from loggers. In return, Marriott receives CO2 credits, which are then offered for sale to hotel guests so that they can continue to relax in their hotel saunas without suffering a bad conscience.

Fisheries experts, on the other hand, recommend only buying fish with the Marine Stewardship Council eco-label. Anyone hoping to enjoy eating marine creatures in an environmentally responsible way in the future will have to do without species like halibut or sole. When it comes to wood, most conservationists recognize the certification awarded by the Forest Stewardship Council.

According to estimates, within only two years consumers worldwide could be spending up to $75 billion (€48 billion) on fish, wood, medicinal herbs and food produced in an environmentally friendly way. In addition, people have long been willing to pay directly for species protection. According to the BfN, every household in Germany would pay an average of €100 ($155) a year to preserve biodiversity. This would amount to a total of €3.5 billion ($5.4 billion). "That's three times as much money as we have had at our disposal so far for species and habitat protection," says Burkhard Schweppe-Kraft, an economist with the BfN.

If natural landscapes are increasingly assigned a value, they could lose their role as "the world's free garbage dump," as Gordon Shepherd of the WWF puts it. But Shepherd also warns that adding value to nature is "no panacea." Indeed, it raises many questions. For instance, developing countries would have to prove that their goal is not simply to rake in additional cash, but that they are serious about protecting diversity.

The industrialized countries, for their part, are likely to be accused of merely orchestrating an enormous green-washing of a failed industrial policy, which for decades treated nature as a cheap self-service shop. Are the mechanisms of the global economy truly suitable for ensuring diversity?

"Conservation based purely on profit could fail in places where, for example, it seeks to protect animals that collide with our interests," writes Douglas McCauley of Stanford University in the journal Nature. According to McCauley, nature that does no harm, but is also of no benefit to man would also fail the economic test.

When wolves kill sheep or cormorants wreak havoc in commercial fish ponds, it is nothing but nature at work. On the other hand, people would be unlikely to pay for conservation based solely on its benefit to man.

Economics and the preservation of diversity are often diametrically opposed. About 50 years ago, for example, the Nile perch was deliberately introduced into Lake Victoria in East Africa. Fishermen in the countries adjoining the lake, Uganda, Tanzania and Kenya, remain enthusiastic about the arrival of the edible fish to this day, because it helped fuel copious economic growth. But the new arrivals spelled ecological disaster for the lake's diverse and unique population of haplochromine cichlids, leading to what social biologist Edward Wilson once called "the most catastrophic wave of extinctions in recent history."

Making the economic value of ecosystems the sole basis of conservation would mean that "nature is only worth protecting if it is also profitable," warns biologist McCauley, referring to the risk of a sudden decline in value.

What happens to the rainforest, which we now want to see serving as a CO2 storage system, if a cheaper technical solution is ultimately found to dispose of greenhouse gases? Will the forest then be liquidated, to borrow an economic term? The value of nature -- its beauty, and its cultural and evolutionary importance -- cannot be estimated, says McCauley. "In the long run, we will achieve more progress if we appeal to human hearts and not their wallets."

In other words, it is up to man to decide what kind of world he wishes to inhabit. Anyone familiar with wilderness knows what will be lost if environmental destruction continues unabated. By the time the world community can agree to a business model to save biodiversity, it could be too late.

We should also consider the need to preserve "refuges for the soul," says Beate Jessel, the president of the BfN. The CBD partners should also take this to heart if they hope to avoid becoming lost in a jungle of international agreements and bilateral sensitivities in Bonn.

Are we negotiating ourselves to death? Words must soon be followed by deeds. Indian economist Pavan Sukhdev, at any rate, sees the situation as dead serious. We face a decision, says Sukhdev, one whether or not our civilization is to survive.

Sukhdev was in Berlin recently for a meeting with German Environment Minister Gabriel to discuss the crisis. The ministry lies across the barren Alexanderplatz square, past a gray, concrete desert. "It's an ideal place for an environment ministry," says Sukhdev. "Every day you see the things you want to prevent."
Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan.
URL:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,554982,00.html

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[Saundra Hummer]

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The Most Savage
Shock Jock of Them All
By
Rory O'Connor
with
Aaron Cutler
In Media is a Plural -- May 23, 2008

Who is Michael Savage? On its surface the answer seems obvious: he's a 66-year-old nationally syndicated conservative talk radio host whose program, The Savage Nation, airs five days a week from its home base of KNEW in San Francisco. He's the founder of the Paul Revere Society, which, according to its mission statement, aims to "take back our borders, our language, and our traditional culture from the liberal left corroding our great nation." He's a former MSNBC cable television talk host who was fired after four months on the job after he told a phone caller, "You should only get AIDS and die, you pig." He's also the third most popular radio talk show host in America, whose weekly audience of more than eight million listeners is surpassed only by Limbaugh and Hannity.

Dig deeper, however, and the question of who Savage is, and how truly savage he is, becomes far more complicated. "Savage" isn't his real name; it seems to speak to his heightened sense of masculinity, his aggression, and his antipathy toward minorities. Born Michael Alan Weiner, "Savage" is the child of Russian-Jewish immigrants. He earned two master's degrees and a Ph.D. in nutritional ethnomedicine from that liberal bastion the University of California, Berkeley. He's written two dozen books, five as Michael Savage and an additional 19 under his given name, on medicine, the subjects of which range from maintaining a healthy diet to breaking a cocaine habit. But by any name, he professes to know what's good for you.

Before the vitriolic monologist emerged, there was another, kinder and gentler Michael. This one roamed Greenwich Village and the Bay Area in the early 1970s, kept a weathered copy of On the Road in his back pocket, and lay on the beach with the renowned beat poets Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti whenever he wasn't working on stand-up comedy routines. He guarded Timothy Leary's LSD supply, and he even once posed naked in a photograph with Ginsberg, a well-known and very public homosexual, which he distributed among friends in an attempt to prove himself part of the counterculture. At some point, however, more than 25 years ago, something took a sinister turn and, like Prince Hal rejecting Falstaff, Savage suddenly disavowed his former friends. In a 2006 interview for SF Weekly, Savage explained, "I was once a child; I am now a man." In the same interview, he said of Ginsberg, "I looked at him almost like a rabbinic figure. Little did I know that he was the fucking devil." For Savage, rejecting his old friends was simply a part of growing up.

The moralist, the healer, and the hedonist - there's a tension between his three identities, which interact like a trio of siblings elbowing each other for seconds at the dinner table. As one listens to his conservative radio talk personality, one is moved to question whether it's his true self, not because Savage isn't consistent in his views, but because the views are so grotesque it's difficult to believe that anyone-let alone a former beatnik-could espouse them with a straight face. While it's more than passing strange for a homophobic, conservative radio host to work out of San Francisco, Savage continues to broadcast nationally from his base in the city he likes to call "San Fran Sicko."

Savage is so extreme that even many of his fellow right-wing talk radio personalities don't like him. Bill O'Reilly calls him a "smear merchant," while Neal Boortz refers to Savage as "the Antichrist." Although Talkers Magazine recently bestowed its annual Freedom of Speech award upon Savage, publisher Michael Harrison says he thinks the man is "an asshole." Liberal advocacy organizations such as GLAAD and ACLU have censured him. Liberal media watchdog groups have compiled long lists of the especially inflammatory remarks Savage has made-many of which must be heard or seen in print to be believed. Collectively they justify the cautionary statement that is read by an announcer before each edition of The Savage Nation.

Why do so many different people dislike Savage and his Nation? Perhaps it's because Savage dislikes so many different people. In his book The Savage Nation: Saving America from the Liberal Assault on Our Borders, Language and Culture, he writes, "I was raised on neglect, anger, and hate. I was raised the old-fashioned way." Despite claiming to have originated the term "compassionate conservative" (and threatening to sue George W. Bush for appropriating it), Savage is usually far more passionate than compassionate. On the issue of illegal immigration, he said:

"We, the people, are being displaced by the people of Mexico. This is an invasion by any other name. Everybody with a brain understands that. Everybody who understands reality understands we are being pushed out of our own country."

On CNN news anchors:

"Wolf Blitzer, a Jew who was born in Israel, [is] probably the most despicable man in the media next to Larry King, who takes a close runner-up by the hair of a nose. The two of them together look like the type that would have pushed Jewish children into the oven to stay alive one more day to entertain the Nazis."

On homosexuality:

"The radical homosexual agenda will not stop until religion is outlawed in this country. Make no mistake about it. They're all not nice decorators

They threaten your very survival

Gay marriage is just the tip of the iceberg. They want full and total subjugation of this society to their agenda."

And in conclusion:

"Why should we have constant sympathy for people who are freaks in every society? I'm sick and tired of the whole country begging, bending over backwards for the junkie, the freak, the pervert, the illegal immigrant. All of them are better than everybody else. Sick."

Listening to a host for whom even George W. Bush is too liberal (Savage particularly lambastes the president on immigration issues) can be an intense experience. Yet millions of people do it. As New Yorker editor Ben Greenman says, "People who listen to Savage say that he's a little extreme but that some of the things he says are also true. I think his show does encourage you to think for yourself, because he's so weirdly contradictory."

Savage's three-hour program often consists of apoplectic rants-usually against a particular group or groups of people allegedly doing damage to America-that end with an animalistic, Network-like cry of "I can't take this anymore!" During calmer times, Savage ends his monologues with a huffy "That's just the way I see it." Sometimes Savage exhibits a rare and startling tenderness, for instance in his fond recollections of the lm director Elia Kazan (famous not only for On the Waterfront but also for naming names to the House Un-American Activities Committee).

And every so often Savage changes the subject, mentioning a great barber he's been to recently or a good movie he's just seen. There is something almost hypnotic about the up-and-down anger on the program; even though Savage's views are not always internally coherent, he is supremely confident and comfortable in expressing them. His ability to steer the course without having to resort to logic to support his points is a trait more often seen in politicians than commentators. Indeed, Savage briefly (if laughably) mulled a run for the 2008 presidency on the grounds that since neither the Democrats nor the Republicans were to be trusted, a nonpolitician like him might be exactly what the country needed.

Savage's main sources of anger these days are illegal immigrants, Islamic terrorists (a near-redundancy for him), and homosexuals. Unlike his parents, who legally emigrated to the United States, arriving in Ellis Island, illegal immigrants assault fundamental American values-or so Savage claims. They not only compromise the security of the border and bring drugs, crime, and disease with them, but they threaten the American way of life-or at least the white male way of life. In reference to Arabs, Savage has said that the "racist, fascist bigots" should be converted to Christianity because "Christianity has been one of the great salvations on planet Earth. It's the only thing that can probably turn them into human beings."

The shift in Savage's attitudes toward homosexuality may be the most revealing of his complex persona. When he was younger, his father mocked Savage's sexuality. "Michael would have on tight black jeans and a boat-necked sweater, and his dad would say, 'I don't like the way you're dressed. You look like a fag,'" childhood friend Alan Zaitz has said. In his first and only novel, Vital Signs, the protagonist (a fortyish Jew named Samuel Trueblood who shares many of Savage's biographical details) says, "I choose to override my desires for men when they swell in me, waiting out the passions like a storm, below decks." There are Savage's years with Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti, including a note to Ginsberg that read, "Watched a tourist from New Zealand taking pictures of Fijian people in the marketplace [and] thought of inserting my camera's lens in your A-hole to photograph the walls of your rectum." These days, his attitude is outright hostility, with, for instance, his continual assertion of a "homosexual mafia" trying to control the state of world affairs. Savage has also said that gay parenting is "child abuse" and that the sight of a gay couple "makes me want to puke."

In an interview with the right-wing Web site NewsMax.com, Savage said, "I guess people love my show because of my hard edge combined with humor and education. Those who listen to me say they hear a bit of Plato, Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, Moses, Jesus, and Frankenstein." Frankenstein aside, that's not bad company, and hyperbole notwithstanding, there are still many members of the conservative faith who swear by him. He has been married to the same woman for 40 years and has two children, a daughter, who is a teacher, and a son, who is the creator of the RockStar Energy Drink. His wild popularity allows him to make increasingly outrageous statements: Victims of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami deserved the devastation because they were harboring terrorists; Democratic presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama was trained in a madrassa. One consistent quality of Savage's vitriol is that he spares no one he feels is contributing to the problem. The Republican Party and the Catholic Church, both of which wanted to help illegal aliens, were equally subject to his wrath.

Over and over again, one wonders where Savage's interest lies, why he is so angry and why he seems to take it all so personally. "It really is a mystery. I have no idea what happened to Michael Weiner," says Lawrence Ferlinghetti, whom Savage has gleefully denounced after his Bay Area days as the owner of "that once-famous communist bookstore," City Lights. "We were his friends, and as far as I know, we never did anything to him."
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"The level of U.S. household debt has risen consistently over the course of the century, climbing from just 33.2 percent of disposable income in 1949 to 102.2 percent in 2000, and to 131.8 percent in 2005, making it the highest ever measured in our national history."

Nan Mooney
From her book
"(Not) Keeping Up with Our Parents,"
in Utne Reader, 5-6/08, p. 40.
~~~
"Blessed are the young, for they shall inherit the national debt"

Herbert Hoover
~~~
"It would be easier to pay off the national debt overnight than to neutralize the long-range effects of our national stupidity"

Frank Zappa
~~~
"When President Bush took office, he inherited a budget in surplus, by $236 billion in fiscal year 2000. In his first budget message, the President proclaimed that his budget would retire nearly '$1 trillion in debt over the next four years,' an accomplishment he touted as 'the largest debt reduction ever achieved by any nation at any time.' But by the year 2004, the surplus was gone, replaced by a deficit of $413 billion-in nominal terms the largest deficit in American history. And here we are today, in the Administration's final year. Instead of retiring $1 trillion in debt, the Administration's policies will increase the debt by $4 trillion by the time the President steps down.
From: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info

http://budget.house.gov/PRArticle.aspx?NewsID=1553
~~~~~
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:: :: :: :: ::
Israelis Almost Took Out Tony Blair's Jet
Israeli Air Force Minutes Away From Shooting Down Tony Blair's Private Jet

By SIMON MCGREGOR-WOOD
JERUSALEM, May 23, 2008 —

The executive jet being used by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair was just minutes away from being shot down by the Israeli Air Force.

Blair, who is now the international community's special envoy to the Middle East, was traveling earlier this week to a special economic conference in the Palestinian city of Bethlehem from Egyptian airspace when two Israeli fighter jets were scrambled to intercept his plane.

Due to a technical fault in Blair's aircraft, its pilot did not respond to Israeli air traffic controllers' calls, leading to suspicions that the jet may have been on a terrorist mission.

The two Israeli planes flew directly above the Blair plane in a position usually taken before attack.

It was then the pilot of the executive jet realized something was wrong and hurriedly made contact with the Israeli air traffic controllers thereby ending the drama.

"They were unaware of it while they were on the plane. They didn't hear about it until afterwards," according to Ruti Winterstein, a spokeswoman for Blair's office.

There was no official comment from the Israeli Defense Force's press office, which normally refuses to comment on what its calls "operational" details.

But an unnamed security source contacted by ABC News confirmed that the incident took place and that the two Israeli fighters were scrambled in accordance with standard procedures designed to protect Israel's skies.

The special economic conference in Bethlehem has been convened to raise much-needed funds for the Palestinian Authority, and to stimulate an economic recovery in the hope that it will encourage Palestinians to support the current U.S.-backed peace process with Israel.

Copyright © 2008 ABC News Internet Ventures

http://abcnews.go.com/International/story?id=4917534&page=1 :: :: :: .

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* * * * * * * * *Carter sees superdelegates prompting Clinton to quit

Sun May 25, 7:06 AM ET
Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter said on Sunday he expects Democratic superdelegates to reveal their choice for presidential nominee soon after the final primary in June and that Hillary Clinton will then have to quit the race.

In an interview with Sky News, Carter said he did not think Clinton was achieving anything by staying in the fight.

"I think not. But of course she has the perfect right to do so," he said while attending a literary festival in Britain.

"I'm a superdelegate ... I think a lot of the superdelegates will make a decision quite, announced quite rapidly, after the final primary on June 3," he told Sky News.

"I have not yet announced publicly, but I think at that point it will be time for her to give it up," Carter said.

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is seen as front-runner. He holds a nearly insurmountable lead in delegates to the party's August nominating convention after months of contests that began in January.

Clinton has refused to quit until the last votes are cast and counted and the Democratic nominee is likely to be decided by the nearly 800 "superdelegates" -- members of Congress and other party insiders -- free to vote for whomever they want.

The Democratic candidates need 2,026 delegates to be nominated to run against Republican John McCain in the November 4 U.S. presidential election.

According to estimates by MSNBC, Obama now has 1,954 while Clinton has 1,783. There are 86 delegates left to be chosen in the state-by-state contests.

(Editing by Catherine Evans)
Copyright © 2008 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080525/pl_nm/usa_politics_carter_dc;_ylt=AvWsvL5fLy2c0ehdt.3YN8 Os0NUE * * * .

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^^^^^^^^^Despite FBI Dissent, Torture Continued
Friday 23 May 2008
by:
Christopher Kuttruff
t r u t h o u t | Report

The hand of a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay (Photo: Robb Kendrick / National Geographic) Go on-site to view:http://www.truthout.org/article/despite-fbi-dissent-torture-continued
In a report released this month by the Department of Justice (DOJ), the Office of Inspector General (OIG) outlined concerns within the FBI regarding interrogation techniques used by the military in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The 438-page report details frequent shifts in Department of Defense (DOD) policies, confusion of military personnel as to proper interrogation protocol and accounts of brutal interrogation that departed from prior military procedures described in the Army Field Manual.

The FBI's Legal Handbook for Special Agents states, "It is the policy of the FBI that no attempt be made to obtain a statement by force, threats, or promises." Furthermore, the FBI's Manual for Administrative and Operational Procedures specifies that "no brutality, physical violence, duress or intimidation of individuals by our employees will be countenanced...."

The OIG report explained that after the 9/11 attacks, the FBI was forced to reevaluate the implications of cooperating with other agencies (particularly the military in Guantanamo (GTMO), Iraq and Afghanistan), given the differences in their respective approaches to interrogation. According to the OIG report, "FBI agents told us that they have always been trained to adhere to FBI protocols, not to other agencies' rules with respect to interview policies or evidence collection."

The differences in protocol, the report states, led to tension and conflicts between FBI and DOD employees.

Until late 2002, the military relied on sections of the Army Field Manual for guidelines on permissible interrogation techniques; however, in December 2002, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld approved an additional set of techniques for use at GTMO, which included "stress positions for a maximum of 4 hours, isolation, deprivation of light and auditory stimuli, hooding, 20-hour interrogations, removal of clothing, exploiting a detainee's individual phobias (such as fear of dogs)."

The DOD "also approved the use of dietary manipulation, environmental manipulation, sleep adjustment, and isolation," the OIG report outlines. These interrogation tactics remained in effect for GTMO until September 2006 when the US Army introduced Field Manual 2-22.3.

Secretary Rumsfeld resigned from his office in November 2006.

Army Field Manual 2-22.3 was adopted in response to The Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, which required a uniform standard for treatment of detainees under DOD custody. The Detainee Treatment Act, which passed through Congress with an overwhelming majority, was undercut by several factors which greatly reduced its substance. A Graham-Levin amendment to the legislation stated: "(e) Except as provided in section 1005 of the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, no court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider--(1) an application for a writ of habeas corpus filed by or on behalf of an alien detained by the Department of Defense at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba."

Further diminishing the Detainee Treatment Act's efficacy, the legislation did not specify which version of the Army Field Manual should be followed (allowing for potential changes to protocol later on). The Act also did not apply to the CIA.

As a final loophole, President George W. Bush issued a signing statement insisting that his authority as commander in chief and head of the "unitary executive branch" allowed him to construe the legislation in a manner that would "protect the American people from further terrorist attacks."

Human rights groups have asserted that not only did the actions by Congress and the president undermine the intent of The Detainee Treatment Act, but also contradicted the Supreme Court case, Rasul v. Bush, which ruled 6-3 to reverse a district court decision that claimed the Judicial Branch had no jurisdiction to hear habeas corpus-related cases involving foreigners held at Guantanamo Bay.

The OIG report describes accounts of naked, sleep-deprived detainees - individuals frequently shackled, put into strenuous positions, exposed to loud music and extreme temperatures. The report also records a variety of other physical and psychological abuses.

Human rights and other advocacy groups have fiercely criticized the DOJ, Congress, and the Bush administration for doing little to prevent interrogation abuses, especially given the extensive evidence of improper treatment of detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay.

"Today's OIG report reveals that top government officials in the Defense Department, CIA and even as high as the White House turned a blind eye to torture and abuse and failed to act aggressively to end it," said Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the ACLU, in a recent press release.

Romero also stressed, "Moreover, the country's top law enforcement agency - the FBI - did not take measures to enforce the law but only belatedly reported on the law's violations. It's troubling that the government seems to have been more concerned with obscuring the facts than with enforcing the law and stopping the torture and abuse of detainees.

The lengthy OIG report, scattered with redacted sections, relies, in part, on a "war crimes" file that was initiated by FBI agents in 2002, but was later shut down by FBI officials who felt, according to the report, "investigating detainee allegations of abuse was not the FBI's mission."

Christopher Kuttruff is an editor and reporter for Truthout. http://www.truthout.org/article/despite-fbi-dissent-torture-continued
^^^^^^^^^^^ .

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.~.~.~.~.~. Calif. quake scientists detail impact of 'Big One'
By
ALICIA CHANG
05.25.08, 3:47 AM ET
Associated Press

LOS ANGELES - The "Big One," as earthquake scientists imagine it in a detailed, first-of-its-kind script, unzips California's mighty San Andreas Fault north of the Mexican border. In less than two minutes, Los Angeles and its sprawling suburbs are shaking like a bowl of jelly.

The jolt from the 7.8-magnitude temblor lasts for three minutes - 15 times longer than the disastrous 1994 Northridge quake.

Water and sewer pipes crack. Power fails. Part of major highways break. Some high-rise steel frame buildings and older concrete and brick structures collapse.

Hospitals are swamped with 50,000 injured as all of Southern California reels from a blow on par with the Sept. 11 attacks and Hurricane Katrina: $200 billion in damage to the economy, and 1,800 dead.

Only about 700 of those people are victims of building collapses. Many others are lost to the 1,600 fires burning across the region - too many for firefighters to tackle at once.

A team of about 300 scientists, governments, first responders and industries worked for more than a year to create a realistic crisis scenario that can be used for preparedness, including a statewide drill planned later this year. Published by the U.S. Geological Survey and California Geological Survey, it is to be released Thursday in Washington, D.C.

Researchers caution that it is not a prediction, but the possibility of a major California quake in the next few decades is very real.

Last month, the USGS reported that the Golden State has a 46 percent chance of a 7.5 or larger quake in the next 30 years, and that such a quake probably would hit Southern California. The Northridge quake, which killed 72 people and caused $25 billion in damage, was much smaller at magnitude 6.7.

"We cannot keep on planning for Northridge," said USGS seismologist Lucy Jones. "The science tells that it's not the worst we're going to face."

USGS geophysicist Kenneth Hudnut said scientists wanted to create a plausible narrative and avoided science fiction like the 2004 TV miniseries "10.5" about an Armageddon quake on the West Coast.

"We didn't want to stretch credibility," said Hudnut. "We didn't want to make it a worst-case scenario, but one that would have major consequences."

The figures are based on the assumption that the state takes no continued action to retrofit flimsy buildings or update emergency plans. The projected loss is far less than the magnitude-7.9 killer that caused more than 40,000 deaths last week in western China, in part because California has stricter building code enforcement and retrofit programs.

The scenario is focused on the San Andreas Fault, the 800-mile boundary where the Pacific and North American plates grind against each other. The fault is the source of some of the largest earthquakes in state history, including the monstrous magnitude-7.8 quake that reduced San Francisco to ashes and killed 3,000 people in 1906.

In imagining the next "Big One," scientists considered the section of the San Andreas loaded with the most stored energy and the most primed to break. Most agree it's the southernmost segment, which has not popped since 1690, when it unleashed an estimated 7.7 jolt.

Scientists chose the parameters of the fictional temblor such as its size and length of rupture and ran computer models to simulate ground movement. Engineers calculated the effects of shaking on freeways, buildings, pipelines and other infrastructure. Risk analysts used the data to estimate casualties and damages.

A real quake would yield different results from the scenario, which excludes possibilities such as fierce Santa Ana winds that could whip fires into infernos.

The scenario: The San Andreas Fault suddenly rumbles to life on Nov. 13, 2008, just after morning rush hour. The quake begins north of the U.S.-Mexican border near the Salton Sea and the fault ruptures for about 200 miles in a northwest direction ending near the high desert town of Palmdale about 40 miles north of downtown Los Angeles.

Scientists chose the scenario because it would create intense shaking in the Los Angeles Basin and neighboring counties - a region with nearly 22 million people.

The scenario will be released at a House Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources meeting in Washington.

Here are the major elements:
_10 a.m.: The San Andreas Fault ruptures, sending shock waves racing at 2 miles per second.

_30 seconds later: The agricultural Coachella Valley shakes first. Older buildings crumble. Fires start. Sections of Interstate 10, one of the nation's major east-west corridors, break apart.

_1 minute later: Interstate 15, a key north-south route, is severed in places. Rail lines break; a train derails. Tremors hit burgeoning Riverside and San Bernardino counties east of Los Angeles.

_1 minute, 30 seconds later: Shock waves advance toward the Los Angeles Basin, shaking it violently for 55 seconds.

_2 minutes later: The rupture stops near Palmdale, but waves march north toward coastal Santa Barbara and into the Central Valley city of Bakersfield.

_30 minutes later: Emergency responders begin to fan across the region. A magnitude-7 aftershock hits, but sends its energy south into Mexico. Several more big aftershocks will hit in following days and months.

Major fires following the quake would cause the most damage, said Keith Porter, of the University of Colorado, Boulder, who studied physical damage for the scenario.

The quake would likely spark 1,600 fires that would destroy 200 million square feet of housing and residential properties worth between $40 billion and $100 billion, according to the scenario.

Once the shaking stops, emergency responders would do a "windshield survey" that involves rolling through neighborhoods to tally damage and identify areas of greatest need, said Larry Collins, captain of the Urban Search & Rescue Task Force at the Los Angeles County Fire Department.

Collins said the scale of the disaster means firefighters would not be able to put out every flame.

"We're going to have to think about out-of-the-box solutions," he said.

Copyright 2008 Associated Press. All rights reserved. http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2008/05/25/ap5046086.html?partner=alerts ~.~.~.~.~.~ .

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* * * * *
A VIDEO
About Assassinating Obama
25 May 2008 06:34 pm

Fox News cannot help itself:

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* * *

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~~~~~~~
"To save your world you asked this man to die; Would this man, could he see you now, ask why?"

W. H. Auden
"Epitaph for an Unknown Soldier"
~~~
"Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them. There is almost no kind of outrage-----torture, imprisonment without trial, assassination, the bombing of civilians-----which does not change its moral color when it is committed by 'our' side. ...The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them."

George Orwell
~~~
"The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundnce of those who have much, it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little"

Franklin Delano Roosevelt
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SPIEGEL ONLINE
DEADLY TEXT
Free Speech Case Tests Afghanistan
By
Jochen-Martin Gutsch
05/19/2008 12:00 AMA
***
I know they've never heard of the saying we here in the West grew up with, "Sticks and Stones", and so because of no more than words, they are itching to commit what we consider the deadliest of sins, the taking of a human life, a life which many of us feel our "God" made, and even those of us who haven't this belief feel that the sanctity of life is all important, and we all lack the blood lust these judges of this young man hold in their black hearts. I have to believe most of us believe that no one among us wants such to happen, us believing that none of us have to right to end a life regardless of what has been said. Let God judge, not "man" with some long held tribal angst, and primitive beliefs. SRH
* * * * *A young Afghan has been sentenced to death for printing out a Web page in which Muhammad is described as a misogynistic prophet. The case will help to determine whether an Islamic country can open itself up to the West.

Sayed Pervez Kambaksh can walk four or five steps forward and backward and three to the side. Aside from the metal bunk bed, a table, a chair and a wooden shelf, his cell contains a primitive toilet and a shower that doesn't seem to work. In Afghanistan, this counts as a good cell. After all, it is a cell for a very special prisoner.

One of the most disconcerting aspects of being a prisoner here is that there is nothing to do. When the door locks behind him, he is left with a sense of uncertainty and with his thoughts, which usually revolve around death and salvation, right and wrong, thoughts he constantly chews over in his mind like a tough piece of meat.

He has received two visits from his brother Yaqub and one from his father. After that, Kambaksh was left to wait for something to happen, hoping that the appeals court in Kabul, which is reviewing his appeal, will do something, and that the judges will understand that they cannot simply string him up or have him face a firing squad for a simple piece of paper.

The Pol-i-Charkhi prison seems to appear out of nowhere like a stone spaceship. Located on the eastern edge of the Afghan capital Kabul, the prison is reached by driving to the end of an unpaved road, a road with potholes so deep that they can engulf a car tire. Depending on the weather and season, the road is either hard and dusty or consists of a deep, brown mud. It leads through a barren landscape devoid of trees and people, ending in front of a tall, steel gate flanked by two stone watchtowers.

The prison itself consists of a collection of faded buildings, narrow and rectangular like upended shoeboxes, constructed in the 1970s and used by the Soviets, the Taliban and now the country's new government. The prison holds 3,200 prisoners: murderers, terrorists, kidnappers, thieves and a handful of poor souls who have no money and no legal representation -- and of whom no one can really say whether they are guilty or innocent.

Sayed Pervez Kambaksh happened upon the text that was to be his undoing on an Iranian Web site. The author called himself Arash. It was neither an academic text nor a serious discussion, but more of an aimless rant. There are hundreds of similar sites on the Internet. The text listed verses in the Koran, followed by interpretations intended to prove that Islam is a misogynistic religion. It isn't difficult to guess which lines eventually led to the charges being filed against Kambaksh.


The text read:
Muhammad sinned often. Muhammad subjugated women. The Koran portrays women as if they were not quite sane. Islam is a religion that is against women.

The Koran justifies Muhammad's sins. Whenever Muhammad wanted something, he would sing a sura and claim that it was coming directly from Allah. He simply banned everything that didn't suit him and allowed the things he liked. It's a joke. This is the true face of Islam, Allah and Muhammad.

Kambaksh may have overestimated his own country. Or perhaps he was deliberately pushing his luck, and maybe he was simply trying to determine how far one could go in the new Afghanistan.


Rising Tension
Kambaksh copied a few passages from the text and arranged them. Whether he wrote a few lines of his own is unclear. Then he printed the text, and later handed out a few copies to fellow students at the university he attended in the city of Mazar-i-Sharif. He wanted to stimulate discussion, just as he had once discussed Marx and Hegel.

The matter quickly gained momentum. A copy of his printout reached the National Directorate of Security (NDS), Afghanistan's domestic intelligence agency, which has its offices across the street from the university. Kambaksh was questioned and then released. His opponents soon began to gather together at the university. Students and instructors organized protests against Kambaksh, accusing him of blasphemy. The mood became increasingly tense, as more and more copies of the text turned up.

To this day, Kambaksh insists that he doesn't know who made the extra copies and where they came from. Soon the copies numbered in the hundreds, and his name was at the top of every one of them. The situation became uncomfortable for Kambaksh. Mullahs at the city's Blue Mosque demanded action be taken. Kambaksh began spending his nights at the houses of friends, and he stopped going to the university. A man from the NDS called his older brother, Yaqub, to tell him that Kambaksh should turn himself in to the agency -- for his own safety. The population, the man said, was agitated, and Kambaksh would be protected against attacks if he was in NDS custody.

Yaqub drove his brother to the gate of the NDS complex, convinced that he was doing the right thing. It was Oct. 27, and it would be Kambaksh's last day as a free man. "I was there for one week," he recalls. "They interrogated me several times a day. At some point, I was at my wits' end and I asked them: 'What do you want from me?' They shoved a piece of paper in front of me on which it was stated that I had copied the text from the Internet, added a few of my own lines, and then duplicated and distributed it. I signed the piece of paper." It was a confession.


An Intimate Court
On Jan. 22, Kambaksh, now a prisoner, was taken to the hearing room at the provincial court in Mazar-i-Sharif. The city is in northern Afghanistan, in a region where German troops are stationed. The hearing room was small and intimate, with its vase of plastic flowers, curtains and a framed photograph of President Hamid Karzai. The room seemed to say: Don't worry, it won't be as bad as you think.

For the presiding judge, Shamsurahman Mohmand, who was wearing heavy, gold-framed sunglasses to protect his sensitive eyes, the room serves as both his office and courtroom. Two other judges sat next to him. The charges were read by Shafiqa Akbar, an experienced prosecutor and a friendly-seeming woman, who was filling in for a sick colleague on that day. It was approximately 4 p.m. Although it was a public hearing, no spectators had found their way to the small room. Kambaksh had no attorney. He was defending himself.

The case revolved around a single sheet of paper, a copy of the text, which Judge Mohmand removed from the file and held up for everyone to see. The sheet of people was the entire case.

Mazar-i-Sharif is smaller and more provincial than Kabul. But the air is better and the city is home to Afghanistan's most beautiful house of worship, the Blue Mosque. Kambaksh was a fourth-year journalism student at the city's university. He shared a small apartment with his older brother Yaqub, a journalist.

Kambaksh was not a bad student, but he periodically felt limited by his environment. The lectures bored him and he considered the instructors to be dogmatic. They were not helping him grow intellectually. After reading books about politics and philosophy, Marx and Hegel at home, he wanted to talk about their view of the world.

Kambaksh comes from a family that is relatively non-religious, at least by Afghan standards. The father was an instructor at the military academy in Kabul and had attended university in Moscow. When the communist government fell in 1991, Kambaksh's father quit his job and took his family to the north, where he found work in an exchange office. Then he opened a bookstore.

Kambaksh and his brother Yaqub were given books to read by some of the world's preeminent writers, including Goethe, Russian classics by Gorky, Dostoyevsky and Chekhov. Later they read Nietzsche, Sartre and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. For someone with Kambaksh's upbringing, a country like Afghanistan is bound to become very confining before long.


'It Wasn't Easy for Me to Demand the Death Penalty'

"He is easily offended," says Nazir, a fellow student. "He isn't an easy person. Pervez asked questions about politics and religions, questions the instructors didn't want to or couldn't answer. Sometimes they would accuse him of thinking in an un-Islamic way, and then he would accuse them of not thinking at all."

There were complaints. The court file contains an instructor's official complaint against Kambaksh for being disruptive in class. "Pervez underestimated the whole thing until the end," says Nazir, his fellow student.

On Jan. 22, the day of the hearing, Kambaksh based his case on a single argument, more or less: his right to freedom of opinion, holding it out to the court like a protective shield. He had written down a statement, which he was not permitted to read in its entirety. He invoked an article in the constitution. The court invoked Sharia law. He spoke of laws written by humans, and they spoke of laws created by God. Kambaksh and the court faced off like two boxers on the opposite sides of the ring.

"He kept repeating that he had not committed a crime, and that he believes in freedom of opinion," recalls Shafiqa Akbar, who has been working in the judicial service for 26 years and has been a prosecutor for 23 years. "He began to read a statement, but it was not a legal plea. He wanted to give a political speech. He wanted to have a discussion with us. I said: 'My boy, are you aware that this is a courtroom?'"

At the appeals court in Kabul, Akbar has the reputation of being one of the best prosecutors in the provinces. "It wasn't easy for me to demand the death penalty," she says. "He was still so young."

Judge Shamsurahman Mohmand, 53, a graduate of the Department of Sharia Law at the University of Kabul, presided over the hearing. "I asked him whether he could defend himself. He said: 'Yes.' I asked him about his health. He said: 'Everything is fine.' Then we began."

It was no layman's court, devoid of legal expertise, that convened on that day in Mazar-i-Sharif. Nor was it a tribunal of religious fanatics. This is what makes the case so difficult. It would be easy to explain away the verdict if it had come from laymen or fanatics. But not with this court. "Under Article 130 of the constitution, Sharia law can be applied to crimes that are not covered by the criminal code. And so I requested that Sharia be applied," says Akbar.

"The evidence against Kambaksh was clear," Akbar says. "We had a sheet of paper containing the text, with his name at the top. We had his confession. We had 11 written statements from students and instructors at the university. He was told that he could request an attorney. But he didn't. He was told that he had the right to remain silent. But he didn't. He was told that he should name counter witnesses. But he didn't. We said: 'Appoint your father, someone we can talk to, because you don't understand us.' But he continued to refuse."

Shafiqa Akbar shrugs her shoulders. Her image of Kambaksh is that of an obstinate child. He was given the hand that would have saved him, but he rebuffed it. Bridges were built for him, but he refused to walk across them. Judge Mohmand says: "I stood up and walked over to him. I said: 'My son, you can deny everything. Just say that you were not the source of this piece of paper. You have the right to remain silent. You are making a mistake.'"

Kambaksh says that his brother Yaqub tried to get him an attorney, but that no one felt confident enough to defend someone accused of blasphemy. Kambaksh says that he was under the impression that the sentence had already been decided, and that everything went very quickly. Kambaksh says that the things he was accused of are not liable to prosecution. He insists that freedom of opinion is unassailable.

Both sides were unwavering, firmly entrenched in their respective worlds.

Judge Mohmand handed down the death penalty. A copy of the sentence -- another piece of paper -- was handed to Kambaksh, who was then led from the courtroom.


A Barometer of Progress
Visiting Kambaksh at the Pol-i-Charkhi Prison is no easy matter. It requires a permit from Sarwar Danish, the country's justice minister. The Kambaksh case has become famous, mostly because no one in Europe or the United States understands why the case should exist in the first place. However one feels about blasphemy, it should not be punishable by death, goes the thinking.

Thus, a case that began in a small provincial court in Afghanistan entered the realm of world politics. President Karzai became involved, as did the United Nations, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and Hans-Gert Pöttering, the president of the European Parliament. The British newspaper The Independent started a petition among its readers to gain the release of Kambaksh in faraway Afghanistan, and his cause even triggered a small demonstration in Kabul.

The case now functions as a barometer of progress in the country. The West sends soldiers, money and advisors to Afghanistan. Everyone is waiting for the country to make its big step forward, a step in the direction of democracy, human rights and all the other good things from places like the United States and Germany, things of which no one can say for sure whether the Afghans even want them. Kambaksh's story now appears as evidence that not much has changed in Afghanistan.

Sarwar Danish, a quiet, amiable man, has served as Afghanistan's justice minister for more than three years. In the late 1970s, he fled from the Soviets to Iran, and after the fall of the Taliban he returned to Afghanistan. Now he sits in his office, his back to a bookshelf full of the kinds of law books lawyers like to consult, and gazes at a gilded statue of Justice judiciously dispensing the law on the desk in front of him.

Danish could call it a mistake. He could say that the provincial court up in the north issued a flawed ruling. But he doesn't.

"This person, Kambaksh, is a young student, a radical who doesn't consider his actions," he says. "He published things that are directed against our religion. The Koran is revered and respected by all Muslims. This is why Muslims cannot be expected to accept unjustified, hostile attacks. The attacks must be treated and punished as blasphemy. Blasphemy is prohibited everywhere in the world, and certainly in Germany. A court of appeal will soon review the sentence against Kambaksh. In Afghanistan, there are many steps before an execution can take place. In the end, the president makes the final decision."

Danish taps his finger against the gilded statue of Justice on his desk. "The symbol of law and justice," he says. "An international symbol." He makes it sound like a shared direction, like some straightforward, global idea. But sitting in Danish's office, one gains a sense of how complicated, in fact, everything is.

And how will President Karzai decide, if it becomes his decision to make? Danish smiles politely. "Our president has only allowed 15 people to be executed in six years. He doesn't like to do it at all."

Danish pulls a small, blue book from his bookshelf, which he intends to give as a present at the end of the conversation. He glances at the attractive cover with its gold lettering. The book is a copy of the Afghan constitution. But whether it means much to Danish is questionable.

Article 34 of this constitution states that freedom of opinion is inviolable. But Article 1 defines Afghanistan as an Islamic republic, and Article 3 stipulates that no law may contradict the holy religion of Islam. Afghans can think, say and write what they please. But they start running into problems when God enters the picture.


'They Sentenced Pervez in Order to Silence Me'

It is mostly because of Yaqub, the brother, that the case did not remain in the provincial court, and that it instead came to the attention of President Karzai and Condoleezza Rice. Yaqub wrote about his brother's predicament. He gave interviews, contacted Western aid organizations and flew to Europe, where he had been invited to talk about the case. In Amsterdam, he bought a pair of red socks that have since become one of his favorite pairs. The socks feature a likeness of Che Guevara in black and the word "Revolución" in yellow.


Yaqub is doing what he believes is his duty, as the older brother. He feels guilty about what happened to his brother. Yaqub refuses to be picked up anywhere. He says, on the telephone, that he will meet me at a certain location. Now he stares through the window of a small café, looking at Kabul in the valley below. It is night and the city becomes quieter and quieter, like a machine that has been switched off.

Yaqub Ibrahimi has been living in Kabul for several weeks. He sleeps in various places, in the apartments of friends and acquaintances, changing locations for security reason, he says.

"The whole thing is probably about me," says Yaqub. "They sentenced Pervez in order to silence me."

Who are "they?"

"The people I have written about. They've been waiting for an opportunity." He glances nervously around the café, looking as if he were about to jump up from his seat. "The piece of paper Pervez printed out was that opportunity."

Yaqub works for the Institute for War & Peace Reporting, a London-based organization that trains journalists in crisis regions. He reports on corruption and human rights violations, and he has written stories describing the lost country that Afghanistan seems to have been for a long time. He wrote about a military commander, a former mujahedeen and powerful man in his district, who kidnapped underage boys, dressed them as girls, ordered them to dance for him and then raped them. He also wrote about another commander who took away a mother's daughter and traded her for a fighting dog.

For that story, Yaqub received Italy's "Journalist of the Year" award in March. He became famous. But in Afghanistan he paid a heavy price for his fame.

"I had been getting threatening phone calls for some time. They told me to watch out, that they would find ways to get rid of me. At one point, five men with Kalashnikovs were standing in front of my apartment. Luckily I wasn't home that evening. The landlord told me about it the next day."

Perhaps everything is related: Yaqub's story about the commander and the death sentence against his brother, Pervez Kambaksh. Perhaps it is a plot. The problem is not whether or not this is true, but that he even considers such a conspiracy to be possible. Yaqub is only 27, and his brother is 23. They are the new generation, the kinds of people Afghanistan sorely needs if the country is to be rebuilt, but they have already lost confidence in the country's new age and new rulers. They do not believe that there is a new Afghanistan, but that, in fact, the country is still its old, rotten, threatening, lawless self. For people like Yaqub, the case boils down to a death sentence and five men with Kalashnikovs.

Yaqub says that Pervez will have to leave the country if he is acquitted. Everyone knows his name now, knows him as the man who committed blasphemy.

Has Yaqub actually read the text that his brother distributed?

"The text is not important," says Yaqub. "In Afghanistan, one has to be able to read and write everything. Freedom of opinion is at stake here."

Shafiqa Akbar, the prosecutor, wears a dark, patterned headscarf, and there is little severity in her face. Her office, a sparse, well-lit room, is only a few hundred meters from the small courtroom where Kambaksh was sentenced and where Judge Shamsurahman Mohmand has his office. Both Akbar and Mohmand have no doubt that they did the right thing.

"There was no other option but the death penalty," says Akbar.

"Someone who commits such a crime deserves to be put to death," says Judge Mohmand. There is no alternative. "Kambaksh insulted the religion of many millions of people, without taking national harmony into account," says Judge Mohmand.

"I hope you can understand that I cannot repeat the primitive insults to the Prophet and to Islam that the text contained," says Akbar. "But they were considerable."

And Article 34, the clause about freedom of opinion?

"Freedom of opinion is a very valuable thing. But that doesn't mean that one should be allowed to violate religious sentiments. Insulting a religion, any religion, is not part of freedom of opinion, but is a criminal offence," says Akbar.

But is it necessary to put someone to death for a violation of religious sentiments?

"There was no other possibility, unfortunately," says Judge Mohmand. "Under Sharia, this is the only option."

The death penalty for a text?

"I have already handed down several death sentences," says Mohmand. "What I do not understand is why this one is causing such a stir, especially abroad. There are no mistakes in the ruling."

Mohmand shakes his head. He laughs periodically during the conversation. He says that he has trouble understanding all the fuss, and why some journalists from halfway around the world have come to see him and are asking questions about law and a religion that they will never understand. In that, at least, he is right. The interview ends without answers. There is too much of a divide between the two cultures. It is an odd feeling.


'I Am a Muslim'
Sayed Pervez Kambaksh traveled along the unpaved road outside Kabul and passed through the gate at the Pol-i-Charkhi prison on March 27. He had a long journey behind him: more than 450 kilometers (280 miles) from the prison in Mazar-i-Sharif in the north to this place on the dusty outskirts of Kabul. He was brought to Pol-i-Charkhi in a car, his feet chained together and accompanied by two armed policemen.

After being admitted, his head was shaved and he was taken to a single-occupancy cell in a new wing built with Canadian money. That was when the door slammed shut behind Kambaksh, sentenced to death for blasphemy, false interpretation of the Koran and insulting the Prophet Muhammad and Islam.

There are books lying on his bed. Kambaksh says that he reads a lot -- fiction and poetry, mostly. He has the face of a boy. Shivering, he tightens his black leather jacket, which he wears over traditional clothing consisting of a thin, baggy fabric shirt and thin, baggy fabric trousers. He wears colorless rubber or plastic sandals on his otherwise bare feet. Kambaksh looks at the five prison guards standing in the cell, monitoring what he says. They look at him with the curiosity of people observing a rare animal.

Kambaksh was due to appear before an appeals court in Kabul Sunday. He hoped he might walk free, but in the end the hearing was adjourned.

Kambaksh's story could turn into a precedent, over where freedom of opinion begins -- and ends -- in Afghanistan. President Karzai has said that he will not become involved any further, but instead wait for the decision in the appeal.

Kambaksh speaks quietly for 20 minutes. He is a student who inadvertently fell into a situation that is too big for him. Then the conversation comes to an abrupt end. The five guards leave the cell, closing the door behind them.

"I have respect for democracy and for every religion," Kambaksh says at the end of the interview. "I am a Muslim."

It already sounds like a possible last sentence in a future closing argument.


Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

URL:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,555513,00.html
RELATED SPIEGEL ONLINE LINKS:
Photo Gallery: A Death Sentence for Insulting the Prophet
http://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/0,,31854,00.html
Not Licensed to Kill: German Special Forces in Afghanistan Let Taliban Commander Escape (05/19/2008)
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,554033,00.html
SPIEGEL 360: Our Complete Afghanistan Coverage
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,k-6948,00.html
© DER SPIEGEL 21/2008
All Rights Reserved Go on-site to view "Photo Gallery and other related articles. Just click here:http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,555513-2,00.html
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[Saundra Hummer]

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:: :: ::
CREDO action TOOLS FOR CHANGEAn activist news letter with a petition to sign. CREDO Action from Working Assets is proud to bring you an urgent alert from our friends at Co-op America, urging ExxonMobil to invest some of their massive profits into developing renewable energy. ExxonMobil's annual shareholder meeting is tomorrow, and environmental advocates are trying to pass resolutions forcing the oil giant to take action on climate change. So I urge you to visit the Co-op America site using the links below and take action today.

Will Easton
Activism Manager, CREDO Action

Tell ExxonMobil: Invest your record profits in clean energy
Tomorrow's shareholder meeting presents a great opportunity for ExxonMobil to move away from tar sands and towards renewable energy.

Tell ExxonMobil to invest in clean energy now!

Dear Friend,

ExxonMobil posted enormous profits of more than $40 billion in 2007. That's billions, with a B, or $40,600,000,000. And the oil-and-gas giant is headed for another record year, having just announced massive first-quarter earnings of $10.9 billion.

According to US News and World Report, if ExxonMobil were a country "its 2007 profit would exceed the gross domestic product of nearly two thirds of the 183 nations in the World Bank's economic rankings."

What do you think ExxonMobil should do with all that money?
We here at Co-op America think we have an answer:

.....1. Develop and implement an aggressive plan to cut ExxonMobil's worldwide carbon emissions by 80—90% by 2050.
.....2. Invest in research, development, and large-scale deployment of clean, nontoxic, renewable energy resources.
.....3. Provide relief to low-income families hard-hit by oil and gas price increases, and take responsibility for climate change impacts on the world's poor.
.....4. Stop getting in the way of US energy security and carbon regulation policy.
.....5. Separate the positions of Chair and CEO to create more independent oversight of the company and its role in creating climate change—stop corporate irresponsibility at the top.

Do you agree?

Thousands of ExxonMobil's own investors do. Last year, a record 31 percent of ExxonMobil shareholders supported a resolution asking ExxonMobil to reduce its greenhouse-gas emissions, and yet ExxonMobil actually admitted in 2007 that the company's emissions have been rising. What's more, Exxon has been leading the way toward exploiting Canada's tar sands, using mining and processing techniques highly destructive to the local environment.

We can't let this happen.

This year, Exxon's shareholders are filing five more climate-related resolutions, demanding greenhouse-gas reduction, research into renewable energy, and more. You can join with Co-op America members and concerned shareholders to tell ExxonMobil that as a consumer and investor you demand cleaner energy now.

Take action today.

And when you take the action, let us know you can edit our letter with your own suggestions of what you think ExxonMobil should do with its massive profits. (Please let us know your creative ideas for ExxonMobil as well!)

For greener energy in America and around the world,

Alisa Gravitz
Executive Director
Co-op America

Tell ExxonMobil: Invest your record profits in clean energy
Tomorrow's shareholder meeting presents a great opportunity for ExxonMobil to move away from tar sands and towards renewable energy.

Click here to gain access to letter/petition:

http://www.coopamerica.org/takeaction/exxon/index.cfm?trk=Credo20080527
Tell ExxonMobil to invest in clean energy now!
Dear Friend,

ExxonMobil posted enormous profits of more than $40 billion in 2007. That's billions, with a B, or $40,600,000,000. And the oil-and-gas giant is headed for another record year, having just announced massive first-quarter earnings of $10.9 billion.

According to US News and World Report, if ExxonMobil were a country "its 2007 profit would exceed the gross domestic product of nearly two thirds of the 183 nations in the World Bank's economic rankings."

http://www.coopamerica.org/takeaction/exxon/index.cfm?trk=Credo20080527
http://www.credoaction.com :: :: :: :: ::
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[Saundra Hummer]

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~~~~~~~
A standing army is one of the greatest mischief that can possibly happen"

James Madison
US fourth president
1751-1836
~~~
"Over grown military establishments are under any form of government inauspicious to liberty, and are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty."

George Washington
~~~
"The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves."

William Hazlitt
~~~
"I hate it when they say, 'He gave his life for his country.' Nobody gives their life for anything. We steal the lives of these kids. We take it away from them. They don't die for the honor and glory of their country. We kill them."

Admiral Gene LaRocque

~~~~~ .

[Saundra Hummer]

.*.*.*.*.*Bush 'Plans Iran Air Strike by August'
By Muhammad Cohen
28/05/08 "Asia Times" -- - NEW YORK - The George W Bush administration plans to launch an air strike against Iran within the next two months, an informed source tells Asia Times Online, echoing other reports that have surfaced in the media in the United States recently.

Two key US senators briefed on the attack planned to go public with their opposition to the move, according to the source, but their projected New York Times op-ed piece has yet to appear.

The source, a retired US career diplomat and former assistant secretary of state still active in the foreign affairs community, speaking anonymously, said last week that that the US plans an air strike against the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). The air strike would target the headquarters of the IRGC's elite Quds force. With an estimated strength of up to 90,000 fighters, the Quds' stated mission is to spread Iran's revolution of 1979 throughout the region.

Targets could include IRGC garrisons in southern and southwestern Iran, near the border with Iraq. US officials have repeatedly claimed Iran is aiding Iraqi insurgents. In January 2007, US forces raided the Iranian consulate general in Erbil, Iraq, arresting five staff members, including two Iranian diplomats it held until November. Last September, the US Senate approved a resolution by a vote of 76-22 urging President George W Bush to declare the IRGC a terrorist organization. Following this non-binding "sense of the senate" resolution, the White House declared sanctions against the Quds Force as a terrorist group in October. The Bush administration has also accused Iran of pursuing a nuclear weapons program, though most intelligence analysts say the program has been abandoned.

An attack on Iraq would fit the Bush administration's declared policy on Iraq. Administration officials questioned directly about military action against Iran routinely assert that "all options remain on the table".

Rockin' and a-reelin'
Senators and the Bush administration denied the resolution and terrorist declaration were preludes to an attack on Iran. However, attacking Iran rarely seems far from some American leaders' minds. Arizona senator and presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain recast the classic Beach Boys tune Barbara Ann as "Bomb Iran". Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton promised "total obliteration" for Iran if it attacked Israel.

The US and Iran have a long and troubled history, even without the proposed air strike. US and British intelligence were behind attempts to unseat prime minister Mohammed Mossadeq, who nationalized Britain's Anglo-Iranian Petroleum Company, and returned Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi to power in 1953. President Jimmy Carter's pressure on the Shah to improve his dismal human-rights record and loosen political control helped the 1979 Islamic revolution unseat the Shah.

But the new government under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini condemned the US as "the Great Satan" for its decades of support for the Shah and its reluctant admission into the US of the fallen monarch for cancer treatment. Students occupied the US Embassy in Teheran, holding 52 diplomats hostage for 444 days. Eight American commandos died in a failed rescue mission in 1980. The US broke diplomatic relations with Iran during the hostage holding and has yet to restore them. Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad's rhetoric often sounds lifted from the Khomeini era.

The source said the White House views the proposed air strike as a limited action to punish Iran for its involvement in Iraq. The source, an ambassador during the administration of president H W Bush, did not provide details on the types of weapons to be used in the attack, nor on the precise stage of planning at this time. It is not known whether the White House has already consulted with allies about the air strike, or if it plans to do so.

Sense in the senate
Details provided by the administration raised alarm bells on Capitol Hill, the source said. After receiving secret briefings on the planned air strike, Senator Diane Feinstein, Democrat of California, and Senator Richard Lugar, Republican of Indiana, said they would write a New York Times op-ed piece "within days", the source said last week, to express their opposition. Feinstein is a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee and Lugar is the ranking Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee.

Senate offices were closed for the US Memorial Day holiday, so Feinstein and Lugar were not available for comment.

Given their obligations to uphold the secrecy of classified information, it is unlikely the senators would reveal the Bush administration's plan or their knowledge of it. However, going public on the issue, even without specifics, would likely create a public groundswell of criticism that could induce the Bush administration reconsider its plan.

The proposed air strike on Iran would have huge implications for geopolitics and for the ongoing US presidential campaign. The biggest question, of course, is how would Iran respond?

Iran's options
Iran could flex its muscles in any number of ways. It could step up support for insurgents in Iraq and for its allies throughout the Middle East. Iran aids both Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Israel's Occupied Territories. It is also widely suspected of assisting Taliban rebels in Afghanistan.

Iran could also choose direct confrontation with the US in Iraq and/or Afghanistan, with which Iran shares a long, porous border. Iran has a fighting force of more than 500,000. Iran is also believed to have missiles capable of reaching US allies in the Gulf region.

Iran could also declare a complete or selective oil embargo on US allies. Iran is the second-largest oil exporter in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and fourth-largest overall. About 70% of its oil exports go to Asia. The US has barred oil imports from Iran since 1995 and restricts US companies from investing there.

China is Iran's biggest customer for oil, and Iran buys weapons from China. Trade between the two countries hit US$20 billion last year and continues to expand. China's reaction to an attack on Iran is also a troubling unknown for the US.

Three for the money
The Islamic world could also react strongly against a US attack against a third predominantly Muslim nation. Pakistan, which also shares a border with Iran, could face additional pressure from Islamic parties to end its cooperation with the US to fight al-Qaeda and hunt for Osama bin Laden. Turkey, another key ally, could be pushed further off its secular base. American companies, diplomatic installations and other US interests could face retaliation from governments or mobs in Muslim-majority states from Indonesia to Morocco.

A US air strike on Iran would have seismic impact on the presidential race at home, but it's difficult to determine where the pieces would fall.

At first glance, a military attack against Iran would seem to favor McCain. The Arizona senator says the US is locked in battle across the globe with radical Islamic extremists, and he believes Iran is one of biggest instigators and supporters of the extremist tide. A strike on Iran could rally American voters to back the war effort and vote for McCain.

On the other hand, an air strike on Iran could heighten public disenchantment with Bush administration policy in the Middle East, leading to support for the Democratic candidate, whoever it is.

But an air strike will provoke reactions far beyond US voting booths. That would explain why two veteran senators, one Republican and one Democrat, were reportedly so horrified at the prospect.

Former broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen told America's story to the world as a US diplomat and is author of Hong Kong On Air (www.hongkongonair.com), a novel set during the 1997 handover about television news, love, betrayal, high finance and cheap lingerie/
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info
*.*.*.*.*.*.* .

[RonF]

Regarding the above - I've written my senators and congresspersons. Have you?

(Below) is why the network news is dying a painful death. They're arrogant, in-denial Idiots.

Network news anchors praise the job they did in the run-up to the war

I was going to add this as an update to my prior post on Scott McClellan's extraordinary description of the media as "deferential, complicit enablers" of Bush administration "propaganda," but it should really stand on its own. Here is an absolutely amazing link to a video where the three network news anchors appeared jointly on The Today Show this morning and were forced by McClellan's book to address whether the media failed in its duties in the run-up to the war -- the first time, to my knowledge, that this topic has ever been broached by network news journalists (h/t Kitt). The fact that television news has blacked-out the whole issue until now is, by itself, rather amazing.

While Katie Couric impressively argued that the media did fail to do its job -- pointing out that the White House threatened networks which were perceived to be too critical with cutting off access to the war and that anyone who questioned the war was deemed unpatriotic and all of that "affected the level of aggressiveness that was exercised by the media" -- the painfully empty-headed Charlie Gibson and the mindlessly establishment-defending Brian Williams both insisted that the media did a perfectly fine job and that they would do nothing different. "There was a lot of skepticism raised about" the Colin Powell speech, said Gibson, in one of the falsest statements ever uttered on TV. He continued:

I think the questions were asked. I respectfully disagree with the gentle lady from the Columbia Broadcasting System [group giggles]. I think the questions were asked. . . . I can remember getting in trouble with administration officials for asking questions they didn't feel comfortable with.

It was just a drumbeat of support from the administration. And it is not our job to debate them; it's our job to ask the questions.

Indeed. Perish the thought that journalists should be adversarial to our political officials, challenge what they say or point out when they're lying. Instead, their job is merely to pose polite questions, let political officials say what they want in response, and then go home -- just as Charlie Gibson said. This is why most establishment journalists will never be convinced that they failed to do their job, no matter how much evidence is presented: because of the understanding they have of what "their job" actually is. If anything, by Gibson's understanding of what they're supposed to be doing, they did their job brilliantly, by letting Bush officials go on their shows and -- as Cheney aide Cathy Martin said about what happens when they went on Tim Russert -- "allow[ing Bush officials] to control the message."

As I often do, I'll use this 2005 speech by the great David Halberstam, delivered at the Columbia School of Journalism, to illustrate how rancid and worthless our establishment journalists of today are -- especially the TV stars like Gibson and Williams. Halberstam observed that "by and large, the more famous you are, the less of a journalist you are," and recounted that his proudest moment in his career was when, as a young reporter in Saigon, he stood down a General in Vietnam who was attempting to threaten and intimidate him from independently investigating claims that the Pentagon was making about the war. Halberstam apparently didn't share Gibson's aversion to "debating" government officials.

Back in 1999, Halberstam wrote: "Somewhere in there, gradually, but systematically, there has been an abdication of responsibility within the profession, most particularly in the networks." He continued:

Television's gatekeepers, at a time when a fragmenting audience threatens the singular profits of the past, stopped being gatekeepers and began to look the other way on moral and ethical and journalistic issues. Less and less did they accept the old-fashioned charge for what they owed the country.

The viewpoint seemed to be -- from their testing and polling -- that the American people did not want to know what was going on, so why bother them with unwanted facts too soon? So, if we look at the media today, we ought to be aware not just of what we are getting, but what we are not getting; the difference between what is authentic and what is inauthentic in contemporary American life and in the world, with a warning that in this celebrity culture, the forces of the inauthentic are becoming more powerful all the time.

The arc of our country and its media: from David Halberstam's confrontation with a U.S. General in Vietnam over his demands to investigate (rather than mindlessly accept) the Pentagon's war claims to Charlie Gibson and Brian Williams sitting around giggling on TV with Matt Lauer and muttering about what a great job they did in covering the administration's march to invade Iraq, when even Bush's own Press Secretary mocks them for being weak, complicit little mouthpieces for government propaganda. That damned Liberal Media.

UPDATE: Concerning this statement by Gibson -- "You go back to the Powell speech. There was a lot of skepticism raised about that" -- I just described it as "one of the falsest statements ever uttered on TV." But when I wrote that, I hadn't gone back and read what Gibson and his Good Morning America colleagues were saying at the time about the Powell speech. Now that I've done that, I realize that I was far too kind in describing Gibson's comment.

On February 6, 2003 -- the day of Powell's speech -- Gibson had on as guests former CIA Director James Woolsey and Terence Taylor of the International Institute For Strategic Studies to analyze Powell's claims. Here are some of the super-tough, skeptical questions Gibson asked:

* Terence Taylor, let me start with you. Specifically, of all the biological and chemical weapons that he outlined, and the means of delivery, what's the most frightening? Should be the most frightening?

* Question number two that was in my mind. James Woolsey, he showed intercepts, he showed photo intelligence. He talked about human resources that we had. How much intelligence was compromised?

* On a scale of one to 10, one being the most sanitized of intelligence information and 10 being laying out all our intelligence ammunition, where was he yesterday on the scale?

* Terence Taylor, as I look at some of the pictures that we were talking about just a moment ago with James Woolsey, the pictures dramatic in that they show Iraqi trucks pulling away from sites virtually as the, as the inspectors trucks are pulling up. How compromised are the inspectors there? Are they totally infiltrated by Iraqi intelligence?

Here's how the segment ended:
CHARLES GIBSON

James Woolsey, the Iraqis immediately challenged a lot of what was shown, said it was altered, said it was doctored. The international community -- do they know that stuff was genuine?

JAMES WOOLSEY

Oh, anybody who is objective about this I think does. The people who now doubt whether or not Saddam really has WMD programs, chemical and bacteriological, in particular, are really of two types, either they work for Saddam or they're doing a human imitation of an ostrich. There really are, I think, no other possibilities.

CHARLES GIBSON

James Woolsey, former CIA Director, Terence Taylor, former weapons inspector, I thank you both.

Oh, the "skepticism" is just so bountiful. The administration must have been just furious with Gibson for his tough, skeptical questions. Later in the show, Diane Sawyer introduced Gibson at the top of the hour and he said: "I'm Charles Gibson in New York. We're gonna have more reaction to Colin Powell's presentation at the United Nations. It was very direct, it was detailed, it was comprehensive." That's just scathing commentary by Gibson.

On the same show, Diane Sawyer introduced Martha Raddatz to talk about the Powell speech, and Raddatz promptly said things like this: "Good morning, Diane. Secretary Powell laid out a strong case against Saddam Hussein," and like this: "Powell said Iraq moved weapons to avoid detection. Satellite imagery, he said, shows a storage area for chemical weapons," and like this: "Powell also said evidence indicates that Iraq may have 25,000 liters of anthrax, has two of three components needed to build a nuclear bomb, and has ties to and harbors al Qaeda."

They then cut to Condoleezza Rice saying: "The Iraqis know what they need to do. And a little bit here and a little there is not going to get it done." Raddatz concluded: "Powell's presentation walked a delicate line between revealing new information and protecting methods of intelligence gathering." There was not a single syllable uttered that questioned any of this and, needless to say, no dissenting voices were heard.

But this morning, Charlie Gibson specifically points to the tough, skeptical reporting he did with regard to Powell's U.N. speech to prove what a great job the media did. Worst of all, that they think they did a good job means they'll not do anything different in the future.

[Saundra Hummer]

I'm always calling or writing to our elected officials Ron, and hope it means something when I do.

Here's a newletter I received today, and even though it tells of damning information about the administration and those who run it, I find it hard to believe anything will come of it, not with the packed, and oh so political Supreme Court. I think that our officials are afraid they will be stuck in their offices and on the hill for months on end and have to do a lot, with a lot of hard work thrust on them if impeachment happens. They aren't up to it it seems. Not made of the right stuff are they?


Dear Saundra R.,

Last night, significant news broke that directly impacts our push for Impeachment Hearings and a possible Inherent Contempt charge for Bush Administration officials such as Karl Rove:

Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan has revealed in his upcoming book that:

• Karl Rove, Scooter Libby, and Vice President Cheney lied about their role in revealing the identity of Valerie Plame Wilson – actions easily amounting to obstruction of Justice.

McClellan also admitted that:

• There was a coordinated effort within the Bush Administration to use propaganda to pump up the case for the Iraq war and hide the projected costs of the war from the public.

Scott McClellan must be called to testify under oath before the House Judiciary Committee to tell Congress and the American people everything he knows about this massive effort by the White House to deceive this nation into war.

Last week, a subpoena was issued for Karl Rove to testify before the Judiciary Committee. It appears he will take every legal action to block this subpoena. The truth is that Congress has the right – and obligation – to hold him accountable now - not months or years from now. It is long past time to pass Inherent Contempt and bring Rove, Libby and others before Congress.

We simply cannot ignore these recent developments, nor should we postpone serious inquiry until after the next election.

Your commitment to accountability for the Bush/Cheney Administration, and the support of 230,000 other Americans who signed up at http://www.wexlerwantshearings.com, has inspired and motivated me in my effort to hold impeachment hearings for Vice President Dick Cheney and Inherent Contempt for Rove and others. During the past months I have been a tireless and dogged advocate of this vitally important cause.

Many of you have written me, asking for an update on where we stand with regards to impeachment hearings. I know most of you believe - as I do - that impeachment hearings for Vice President Cheney – are not only justified, but that it is our constitutional obligation to look into the serious allegations of wrongdoing that have been raised. This is especially true based on the newest revelations from Scott McClellan.

I believe that it is the duty of Congress to pursue impeachment whenever there's significant evidence of wrongdoing, be it by Republicans or Democrats, regardless of the timing of elections or the current political environment.

Some of you have written me demanding that I deliver hearings or impeachment. As hard as I have been fighting for this cause, I cannot make impeachment happen by myself. What I can do, and what I have been doing at every turn, is trying to communicate two simple messages to my colleagues:

• the serious allegations of wrongdoing and the clear-cut rationale for impeachment hearings;and
• the fact that the public will support our efforts when Congress boldly acts on the side of justice and accountability.

Unfortunately, to date, these arguments have not been enough to convince even a majority of the liberal and progressive Members of Congress to support impeachment hearings. In addition, the leadership of the Democratic Party in Congress genuinely feels that pursuing impeachment will jeopardize our congressional agenda and threaten gains in the November elections. Although I genuinely disagree with this view, to date I have been unable to convince them to change this policy.

I understand the challenges that we are up against, and I recognize the odds that we face. Nevertheless, I remain unfazed and unyielding.

This new evidence from Scott McClellan could be the tipping point – but we must move quickly. I will use the McClellan admissions to help convince my colleagues that we must hold impeachment hearings.

Regardless, I will continue to fight for progressive values and our Constitution. I will do everything I can to pursue accountability for criminal actions taken by this Administration and this Vice President. I will be a furious opponent to any expansion of this misguided war, and I will fight against the use of torture by our government and to protect our civil liberties here at home.

Most of all, I will continue my efforts to convince my fellow members of Congress and voters, that we should not be a party of passivity - but that we succeed when we present the public with stark choices that are based on the guarantees in our Constitution, and not on the politics of the moment.

I will continue - at every pass - to call for impeachment and accountability. While I wish more of my colleagues supported our movement, we must not let our discouragement lead to apathy and distraction in this important election year when we must break free from eight long years of illegalities, corporate handouts, and a tragic and devastating war.

We should not end the calls for impeachment. I will push against the crimes of the Bush Administration whenever I am provided the opportunity. I will use my role on the Judiciary Committee to take on Administration officials – like I have done with Condoleezza Rice, Attorney Generals Gonzalez and Mukasey, and FBI Director Mueller.

I have not given up our fight to hold this Administration accountable and neither can you. I am grateful for your patriotism and your support. I'll continue to keep you informed and part of the conversation.

Sincerely,

Congressman Robert Wexler

If impeachements are not implemented, and Cheney/Bush/Israel strike Iran, who will then be at fault? A complacent country? Us? Even though so many of us have worked and worked to open everyones eyes and minds as to what is going on with Cheney and Bush, and their PNAC plans. Why is it so very few seem to even care where they've taken us and what their next plans are?

Good luck Congressman Wexler, you will need it and all the bright minds you can draw up around you to work quickly to get this much needed job done.

[Saundra Hummer]

.
^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ Where Is the Outrage?
By
Robert Scheer

28/05/08 "TruthDig " -- --Are we Americans truly savages or merely tone-deaf in matters of morality, and therefore more guilty of terminal indifference than venality? It’s a question demanding an answer in response to the publication of the detailed 370-page report on U.S. complicity in torture, issued last week by the Justice Department’s inspector general.

Because the report was widely cited in the media and easily accessed as a pdf file on the Internet, it is fair to assume that those of our citizens who remain ignorant of the extent of their government’s commitment to torture as an official policy have made a choice not to be informed. A less appealing conclusion would be that they are aware of the heinous acts fully authorized by our president but conclude that such barbarism is not inconsistent with that American way of life that we celebrate.

But that troubling assessment of moral indifference is contradicted by the scores of law enforcement officers, mostly from the FBI, who were so appalled by what they observed as routine official practice in the treatment of prisoners by the United States in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo that they risked their careers to officially complain. A few brave souls from the FBI even compiled a “war crimes file,” suggesting the unthinkable — that we might come to be judged as guilty by the standard we have imposed on others. Superiors in the Justice Department soon put a stop to such FBI efforts to hold CIA agents and other U.S. officials accountable for the crimes they committed.

That this systematic torture was carried out not by a few conveniently described “bad apples” but rather represented official policy condoned at the highest level of government was captured in one of those rare media reports that remind us why the Founding Fathers signed off on the First Amendment.

“These were not random acts,” The New York Times editorialized. “It is clear from the inspector general’s report that this was organized behavior by both civilian and military interrogators following the specific orders of top officials. The report shows what happens when an American president, his secretary of defense, his Justice Department and other top officials corrupt American law to rationalize and authorize the abuse, humiliation and torture of prisoners.”

One of those top officials, who stands revealed in the inspector general’s report as approving the torture policy, is Condoleezza Rice, who in her capacity as White House national security adviser turned away the concerns of then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft as to the severe interrogation measures being employed. Rice, as ABC-TV reported in April, chaired the top-level meetings in 2002 in the White House Situation Room that signed off on the CIA treatment of prisoners — “whether they would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subjected to simulated drowning, called water boarding. …” According to the report, the former academic provost of Stanford University came down on the side of simulated drowning.

As further proof that women are not necessarily more squeamish than men in condoning such practices, the report offers examples of sexual and religious denigration of the mostly Muslim prisoners by female interrogators carrying out an official policy of “invasion of space by a female.” In one recorded instance observed by startled FBI agents, a female interrogator was seen with a prisoner “bending his thumbs back and grabbing his genitals … to cause him pain.” One of the agents testified that this was not “a case of a rogue interrogator acting on her own.” He said he witnessed a “pep rally” meeting conducted by a top Defense Department official “in which the interrogators were encouraged to get as close to the torture statute line as possible.”

That was evidently the norm, according to FBI agents who witnessed the interrogations. As The New York Times reported, “One bureau memorandum spoke of ‘torture techniques’ used by military interrogators. Agents described seeing things like inmates handcuffed in a fetal position for up to 24 hours, left to defecate on themselves, intimidated by dogs, made to wear women’s underwear and subjected to strobe lights and extreme heat and cold.”

In the end, what seems to have most outraged the hundreds of FBI agents interviewed for the report is that the interrogation tactics were counterproductive. Evidently the FBI’s long history in such matters had led to a protocol that stressed gaining the confidence of witnesses rather than terrorizing them into madness. But an insane prisoner is the one most likely to tell this president of the United States what he wants to hear: They hate us for our values.

Robert Scheer’s new book, “The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America,” will be released June 9 by Twelve.

Copyright © 2008 Truthdig, L.L.C.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info ^ ^^^^^^^ ^ .

[Saundra Hummer]

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~~~~~~~
"We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men"

George Orwell
~~~
"The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them"

George Orwell
~~~
"If a thief breaks into my house, burns and destroys my property, and kills or threatens to kill me, or those that are in it, and to "bind me in all cases whatsoever" to his absolute will, am I to suffer it?"

The American Crisis
by
Thomas Paine
http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/paine/pframe.htm
~~~~~ .

[Saundra Hummer]

:: :: :: :: :: :: ::
Want photographs of what war is doing to other human beings? Send your email address to the fellow who wrote this article, he will send them to you. I remember the pictures from our other wars, and wars others have been in and not so sure I want to see more. I can only imagine how horrific and troubling they must be. Just click on the fellows email address at the end of this article. SRH
Are You A Coward Like Me?

By
Ibrahim Turner

27/05/08 "ICH" -- -From time to time I receive from my friends in the Middle East, horrific photographs of the atrocities perpetrated on the Palestinians by the IDF. (Israel Defence Force)

Apparently these photographs are never ever distributed in the western media; they are in fact, censored.

Additionally, any essays or discussions about the Israel/Palestinian situation also never see the light of day in the Western media.

Why is that?

There are on the Internet at least, some articles about the Israel Lobby, and even books and articles appear in the mainstream press, most notably the writings of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. And there is the book by the former President of the United States, Jimmy Carter, with his book, "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid," which was fiercely attacked by the foot soldiers of the Israel Lobby.

Witness also the vociferous ongoing war of words between Alan Dershowitz and Norman Finkelstein, which has resulted in Professor Finkelstein not being offered tenure at the DePaul University. While I was checking the spelling of his name I came across this breaking news.
BREAKING NEWS: "Israel Arrests Outspoken Academic Norman Finkelstein"

(Democracy NOW! "And the American academic Norman Finkelstein has been arrested and ordered deported from Israel. Finkelstein arrived in Tel Aviv earlier today on his way to the Occupied Territories. He was immediately detained and told he is banned from Israel for ten years. He's expected to be deported tomorrow. Finkelstein is known as one of the most prominent academic critics of Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. He was detained by the Interior Ministry and Shin Bet.") NEW! 05.23.2008

So these people and many others, have stood up to the torrent of criticism directed at them from the Israel Lobby and their cohorts, even though the criticism is usually nothing to do with their message, but an attack on the messenger, denigrating the character, outright lies about the slightest error in their work, and so on.

So I ask you, are you brave enough to take on the almost complete control of the media and public opinion that has grown up in the United States and also in Europe? And if you are so inclined, in what way?

Writing articles on blogs and websites isn’t very brave really; it never has a chance of getting into the mainstream press or on radio and TV. Of course there are a few radio and TV stations that do publish such things, but are they largely preaching to the choir? I do get email alerts and messages to my inbox, from quite a few of these, and of course welcome the information. But what do I do with it?

And I sometimes get photographs of things happening in Gaza and the West Bank, in Iraq and Afghanistan, which are heartbreaking and bring tears to my eyes. But what do I do with them? Very often the sender requests that I forward the photographs to as many people as possible. I hesitate to forward them to my friends because although my friends may be, in some ways quite open, my hesitation either stems from my cowardice in not standing up for what I profess to believe in, human rights, etc and rationalizing that perhaps they are too busy, are already working to help people in other ways.

I’m sure that face to face, my friends would probably agree with me about these things happening in Gaza and the West Bank, Iraq and so on, but would they do anything about it? I’m not sure.

This brings me to the realization that most people abhor such things but would prefer not to be disturbed from their comfortable lives, especially as they get older. It always seems to be the young that go on marches and protests. That’s not to say there are no older people in those marches, far from it. But by and large people have other personal worries, like keeping their jobs, making mortgage payments and bringing up their kids, the numbers in the protests speak for themselves.

And then there is the recent history of such protests. I was in Istanbul at the time, but in England there was the largest protest against the war in Iraq just before Tony Blair and George Bush gave the orders to invade. What effect did that protest have? Nada, zilch, nowt. This lack of power leads to despair for many people and they give up. Quite often in the comments of progressive sites people actually say, we are preaching the choir and unless we get out there on the streets, nothing will change. Others try to counter this despair by enthusiastically advocating meet up groups, as in the ‘Ron Paul Revolution’, and although that is remarkable and commendable, will that lead to Ron Paul being elected as the next President of the United States. The best one can say is that the jury is still out on that one.

So while there are plenty of advocates for change both in the United States and Europe as well as in Israel, when you stand back and look at it, there is no communication between the different groups and no organization. They all seem to be waiting for the White Knight in shining armour to come and rescue them all and perhaps also with the Palestinians.

But my contention is that there will not be a White Knight and the ‘Age of Aquarius’ is characterized by group co-operation. The character of the preceding age of Pisces was the cult of the individual. Anyone who knows the astrological signs knows that the sign of Pisces is the last of the twelve signs and that there is a great new beginning with the start of the next cycle.

Part of the despair felt by people who advocate change is based on the seemingly large intractable forces involved. One elite group sends its working class cannon fodder to fight the working class cannon fodder of the elites of another group or nation. How can one individual or small group of people change anything in that scenario? Witness the many dual nationality Neocons who have infiltrated the United States government and their ideology of perpetual war, for the sake of Israel, marrying Israel’s interests with the USA’s interests in the area, and the complete complicity of the ruling class of America to standing by Israel, right or wrong.

The common people seem to have no chance of overturning this situation. Yet these people are just that, people, who have banded together to achieve their goals, and very successfully. The forces and people who appose this ideology are successfully marginalized, ridiculed and nullified because of the complete take over of the means of communication, the mainstream press, radio and TV. The only medium left to the others is the Internet, and the Pentagon has indicated that it would like to shut it down. And on the Internet there are many trolls, publishing disinformation and distractions, some of them very clever, but most are easily spotted and ignored.

There are hundreds of thousands of people who would like to see the Zionist regime disappear from the pages of time, as Ahmadinejad said, and who is consistently misquoted, and I’m sure you all know the phrase that is repeated time and again.

But are you going to stand up for justice and human rights in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere? Will you forward articles and photographs that are sent to you? Will you add your pen to others in advocating change in America, Europe and Israel?

Everyone reading this should, at the very least, contemplate their own complacency and cowardice in the face of the undoubted strong entrenched groups that want to keep you in their control, devoid of real information, and the feeling of helplessness and powerlessness. Will you reach out to others of like mind? Will you put your pet project aside for the greater good? Will you agree with what I have written and then go on to the next thing? When will you make a stand and act like Norman Finkelstein and Jimmy Carter and many others, taking the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, and return again and again to the fray, the greater jihad of struggling with your weaknesses?

From today, with my limited resources and indifferent health, I will not despair, will not roll over and play dead, hoping to avoid the fight that we must all undertake – to rid the world of tyrants and not allow ourselves to be corrupted by their ideology.

Ibrahim Turner - If you wish to see the photographs that were sent to me send me your email address and I will forward them. inkyfingers007@hotmail.com

To see this article and more, click on the link below:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::
.

[Saundra Hummer]

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* * * * * Your Government Failed You: Breaking the Cycle of National Security Disasters
Richard A. Clarke
(Hardcover) 416 Pages
BUZZFLASH REVIEWS

Released on May 27th and written by THE Richard A. Clarke, the one former U.S. government official who actually apologized to the surviving families of 9/11 for the Bush Administration's malfeasance in preventing the disaster. Clarke, of course, tried to pull the fire alarm on 9/11, but no one was home in the Bush White House. At one point, Bush privately took Clarke to the woodshed for not going along with the WH bullcrap and lies.

Clarke revealed all this and more in the bestselling, "Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror." Now he is back with another fire alarm about how little has been done to actually protect us beyond belligerent words from Bush and Cheney. (Cheney has been kind of low profile lately, hasn't he? What's up with that?)

From Harper Collins, publisher:
Richard Clarke's dramatic statement to the grieving families during the 9/11 Commission hearings touched a raw nerve across America. Not only had our government failed to prevent the 2001 terrorist attacks, but it has proven itself, time and again, incapable of handling the majority of our most crucial national security issues, from Iraq to Katrina and beyond. This is not just a temporary failure of our current leadership—it is a systemic problem, the result of a pattern of incompetence that must be understood, confronted, and prevented.

Clarke's first book, the number one bestseller Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror, explained how the United States had stumbled into a struggle with violent Islamist extremists. Now, in Your Government Failed You, Clarke looks at why these unconscionable failures have continued and how America and the world can succeed against the terrorists. Yet Clarke also goes far beyond terrorism, to examine the inexcusable chain of recurring U.S. government disasters. Despite the lessons of Vietnam, there is Iraq. A trail of intelligence failures litters the Washington landscape. From Katrina to color codes and duct tape, "homeland security" has been an oxymoron. Why does the superpower continue to bobble national security?

Clarke minces no words in his examination of the breadth and depth of the mediocrity, entropy, and collapse endemic in America's national security programs. In order for the United States to stop its string of strategic mistakes, we first need to understand why they happen. Drawing on his thirty years in the White House, Pentagon, State Department, and intelligence community, Clarke gives us a privileged, if horrifying, look into the debacle of government policies, discovering patterns in the failures and offering ways to stop the cycle once and for all.


BUZZFLASH REVIEWS
http://www.buzzflash.com
* * * * * * * .

[Saundra Hummer]

.
.............
Wasserman Schultz: Judiciary Committee Willing To Arrest Rove If He Doesn't Testify
May 28, 2008
@ 11:54 am
By
Walter Alarkon

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) said that the House Judiciary Committee would be willing to arrest Karl Rove if the former White House official doesn't testify about his role in the firing of nine U.S. attorneys in 2006.

Wasserman Schultz, in an interview on MSNBC Tuesday, echoed the demand of House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.) that Rove would not be allowed to invoke executive privilege to avoid testifying. Rove could not invoke the privilege since he said he did not have conversations with the president about the attorneys' firing, Wasserman Schultz said.

Asked by MSNBC host Dan Abrams if the committee would go far as having Rove arrested, Wasserman said it would.

"Well, if that's what it takes," she said. "I mean we really cannot allow the co-equal branch of government, the legislative branch, to be trampled upon by the executive branch. The founding fathers established three branches of government. We are a co-equal branch, and this is an administration that essentially has ignored and disrespected the role of the legislative branch for far too long."

Rove said Sunday that the Judiciary Committee has refused to take up offers by his lawyer and the Bush administration that would allow the committee to find the information it's seeking without Rove's testimony.

Watch Wasserman Schultz's interview below.
(Go on-site to gain access to links within this article as well as the VIDEO: http://briefingroom.thehill.com/2008/05/28/wasserman-schultz-judiciary-committee-willing-to-arrest-rove-if-he-doesnt-testify/


Wasserman Schultz, in an interview on MSNBC Tuesday, echoed the demand of House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.) that Rove would not be allowed to invoke executive privilege to avoid testifying. Rove could not invoke the privilege since he said he did not have conversations with the president about the attorneys' firing, Wasserman Schultz said.

Asked by MSNBC host Dan Abrams if the committee would go far as having Rove arrested, Wasserman said it would.

"Well, if that's what it takes," she said. "I mean we really cannot allow the co-equal branch of government, the legislative branch, to be trampled upon by the executive branch. The founding fathers established three branches of government. We are a co-equal branch, and this is an administration that essentially has ignored and disrespected the role of the legislative branch for far too long."

Rove said Sunday that the Judiciary Committee has refused to take up offers by his lawyer and the Bush administration that would allow the committee to find the information it's seeking without Rove's testimony.

Watch Wasserman Schultz's interview below.

Archived under: Administration, News, Oversight
Tags: Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Karl Rove, U.S. Attorneys ............... .

[Saundra Hummer]

.
:: :: :: :: :: :: ::
White House stories
By
Politico.

On Wednesday night, CNN’s Jessica Yellin talked to Anderson Cooper about Scott McClellan’s tell-all memoir and agreed with the former press secretary that White House reporters “dropped the ball” during the run-up to war.

But Yellin went much further, revealing that news executives — presumably at ABC News, where she’d worked from July 2003 to August 2007 — actively pushed her to not do hard-hitting pieces on the Bush administration.

“The press corps was under enormous pressure from corporate executives, frankly, to make sure that this was a war presented in a way that was consistent with the patriotic fever in the nation and the president’s high approval ratings,” Yellin said.

“And my own experience at the White House was that the higher the president’s approval ratings, the more pressure I had from news executives — and I was not at this network at the time — but the more pressure I had from news executives to put on positive stories about the president, I think over time….”

But then a shocked Cooper jumped in, asking, “You had pressure from news executives to put on positive stories about the president?”

“Not in that exact…. They wouldn’t say it in that way, but they would edit my pieces,” Yellin said. “They would push me in different directions. They would turn down stories that were more critical, and try to put on pieces that were more positive. Yes, that was my experience.”

–by Michael Calderone
Go on-site for LINKS within the article, as well as the VIDEO by clicking the following URL:
http://www.mediachannel.org/wordpress/2008/05/29/cnns-yellin-network-execs-killed-critical-white-house-stories/ :: :: :: :: :: .

[RonF]

I'm always calling or writing to our elected officials Ron, and hope it means something when I do.

Here's a newletter I received today, and even though it tells of damning information about the administration and those who run it, I find it hard to believe anything will come of it, not with the packed, and oh so political Supreme Court. I think that our officials are afraid they will be stuck in their offices and on the hill for months on end and have to do a lot, with a lot of hard work thrust on them if impeachment happens. They aren't up to it it seems. Not made of the right stuff are they?


Dear Saundra R.,

Last night, significant news broke that directly impacts our push for Impeachment Hearings and a possible Inherent Contempt charge for Bush Administration officials such as Karl Rove:

Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan has revealed in his upcoming book that:

• Karl Rove, Scooter Libby, and Vice President Cheney lied about their role in revealing the identity of Valerie Plame Wilson – actions easily amounting to obstruction of Justice.

McClellan also admitted that:

• There was a coordinated effort within the Bush Administration to use propaganda to pump up the case for the Iraq war and hide the projected costs of the war from the public.

Scott McClellan must be called to testify under oath before the House Judiciary Committee to tell Congress and the American people everything he knows about this massive effort by the White House to deceive this nation into war.

Last week, a subpoena was issued for Karl Rove to testify before the Judiciary Committee. It appears he will take every legal action to block this subpoena. The truth is that Congress has the right – and obligation – to hold him accountable now - not months or years from now. It is long past time to pass Inherent Contempt and bring Rove, Libby and others before Congress.

We simply cannot ignore these recent developments, nor should we postpone serious inquiry until after the next election.

Your commitment to accountability for the Bush/Cheney Administration, and the support of 230,000 other Americans who signed up at http://www.wexlerwantshearings.com, has inspired and motivated me in my effort to hold impeachment hearings for Vice President Dick Cheney and Inherent Contempt for Rove and others. During the past months I have been a tireless and dogged advocate of this vitally important cause.

Many of you have written me, asking for an update on where we stand with regards to impeachment hearings. I know most of you believe - as I do - that impeachment hearings for Vice President Cheney – are not only justified, but that it is our constitutional obligation to look into the serious allegations of wrongdoing that have been raised. This is especially true based on the newest revelations from Scott McClellan.

I believe that it is the duty of Congress to pursue impeachment whenever there's significant evidence of wrongdoing, be it by Republicans or Democrats, regardless of the timing of elections or the current political environment.

Some of you have written me demanding that I deliver hearings or impeachment. As hard as I have been fighting for this cause, I cannot make impeachment happen by myself. What I can do, and what I have been doing at every turn, is trying to communicate two simple messages to my colleagues:

• the serious allegations of wrongdoing and the clear-cut rationale for impeachment hearings;and
• the fact that the public will support our efforts when Congress boldly acts on the side of justice and accountability.

Unfortunately, to date, these arguments have not been enough to convince even a majority of the liberal and progressive Members of Congress to support impeachment hearings. In addition, the leadership of the Democratic Party in Congress genuinely feels that pursuing impeachment will jeopardize our congressional agenda and threaten gains in the November elections. Although I genuinely disagree with this view, to date I have been unable to convince them to change this policy.

I understand the challenges that we are up against, and I recognize the odds that we face. Nevertheless, I remain unfazed and unyielding.

This new evidence from Scott McClellan could be the tipping point – but we must move quickly. I will use the McClellan admissions to help convince my colleagues that we must hold impeachment hearings.

Regardless, I will continue to fight for progressive values and our Constitution. I will do everything I can to pursue accountability for criminal actions taken by this Administration and this Vice President. I will be a furious opponent to any expansion of this misguided war, and I will fight against the use of torture by our government and to protect our civil liberties here at home.

Most of all, I will continue my efforts to convince my fellow members of Congress and voters, that we should not be a party of passivity - but that we succeed when we present the public with stark choices that are based on the guarantees in our Constitution, and not on the politics of the moment.

I will continue - at every pass - to call for impeachment and accountability. While I wish more of my colleagues supported our movement, we must not let our discouragement lead to apathy and distraction in this important election year when we must break free from eight long years of illegalities, corporate handouts, and a tragic and devastating war.

We should not end the calls for impeachment. I will push against the crimes of the Bush Administration whenever I am provided the opportunity. I will use my role on the Judiciary Committee to take on Administration officials – like I have done with Condoleezza Rice, Attorney Generals Gonzalez and Mukasey, and FBI Director Mueller.

I have not given up our fight to hold this Administration accountable and neither can you. I am grateful for your patriotism and your support. I'll continue to keep you informed and part of the conversation.

Sincerely,

Congressman Robert Wexler

If impeachements are not implemented, and Cheney/Bush/Israel strike Iran, who will then be at fault? A complacent country? Us? Even though so many of us have worked and worked to open everyones eyes and minds as to what is going on with Cheney and Bush, and their PNAC plans. Why is it so very few seem to even care where they've taken us and what their next plans are?

Good luck Congressman Wexler, you will need it and all the bright minds you can draw up around you to work quickly to get this much needed job done.

That remark about writing congressmen was intended to be a general question, Sandi....not personal. I, too, hope it means something. I wonder. Good luck to Wexler, indeed. With the McClellan memoir and the new Clark book - there's more than enough to impeach right there. It makes me sick think that Bush might get away with his crimes of the century. Obama said he would immediately investigate Bush's administration but who knows?

[Saundra Hummer]

. :: :: :: :: ::
Scott McClellan and the Politics of Profitable Hurt
By
pmcarpenter
Created 05/29/2008 - 6:57am
THE FIFTH COLUMNIST
By
P.M. Carpenter
Published on BuzzFlash.org
(http://www.buzzflash.com/articles)

Well, former White House press secretary Scott McClellan got the media firestorm he was hoping for, which will make the unemployed propagandist millions of dollars, which, I'm sure, he was hoping for even more.

Old -- sometimes even young -- right wingers never seem to die; they just fade, and not even courteously away, into filthy and immensely undeserved riches.

He's now being offered up by many on the left for political sainthood, because he's perceived as having turned on his old boss (which, according to those who've actually read all of What Happened, isn't quite the case). And that's the sort of Greek political drama we love. It's more than Oedipal, it's tasty.

But lest we forget: If Scottie had not been pushed out of Propaganda Central, he would still be standing there at the White House podium, spewing the vilest of deceptions and lies on behalf of his criminal keepers.

Setting the record straight and reclaiming his credibility, my butt. Truth is, this vengeful turncoat got his feelings hurt, as opposed to losing an arm or a leg or his manhood or his head in a cockeyed war without justification, except from a political marketing point of view.

Watching others suffer those far more monstrous fates was somehow emotionally bearable for Scottie, as long as, that is, he was one of the boys. When his innate incompetence caught up to him, however, and Bush's chief of staff decided to put him out to the pasture in which he had always belonged, what once was bearable became oppressive.

So Scottie got scruples. Along with a nice book contract.

And just "what happened," may I ask, as reported by Scottie not that we didn't already know? Which is to say, what Scottie knew all along? What is it that Scottie learned after leaving the White House that he didn't well know when he was in the White House -- when, that is, he was playing its game, happily attempting mass deception for personal notoriety and a paycheck?

Was he aware of the Iraq war as having been marketed as casually as a new toothpaste? Yep. Was he aware of the White House's "political propaganda" machinery having grievously "manipulat[ed] sources of public opinion"? Yep. Hell, we all were.

Was he aware that his White House comrades had "downplay[ed] the major reason for going to war," which actually was twofold: the idiotic idea of establishing something idiotically called "coercive democracy" in the Middle East, largely for the greater personal glory of President George W. Bush? Yep, and yep.

And when did Scottie do something about all this? While he may not have been in the White House loop that was piecing the bloody and irreversible scam together, he learned of its infrastructure and working details while actively around them.

Yet he did nothing, said nothing, revealed nothing when it might have mattered -- when, as he now writes, the White House was "turn[ing] away from candor and honesty when those qualities were most needed."

If those words hadn't been written by a typically opportunistic right winger, they'd be breathtaking.

One of Scottie's criticisms of Bush is that the president "convinces himself to believe what suits his needs at the moment." You don't say, Mr. McClellan. That trait seems to run in his political family, does it not?

But here's what I know, Scottie. Here's what really happened.

You and your criminal cohort damn near destroyed this nation. I could sit here and write a long list of the hows, whats and whys, but they are too universally known to any longer bother with. By now, virtually everyone knows "what happened," Scottie.

Only a few will profit from it, however. Very few. You were one of the few then, and you're one now.

Congratulations. As others struggle over the next 20 or 30 years to overcome the vast wreckage you helped cause, you'll be sitting pretty. Congratulations, indeed, you criminal ass.

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[Saundra Hummer]

That remark about writing congressmen was intended to be a general question, Sandi....not personal. I, too, hope it means something. I wonder. Good luck to Wexler, indeed. With the McClellan memoir and the new Clark book - there's more than enough to impeach right there. It makes me sick think that Bush might get away with his crimes of the century. Obama said he would immediately investigate Bush's administration but who knows?


I gathered that Ron, a good question and statement about letting those in power know how we think, what we need and want, and I think your post is terrific.

You know, it wasn't until I got a computer, and becoming an activist became such an easy thing to do, that I became so totally involved. Sorry to say, but it being easy is what made it possible for me. We have always lived way out, struggled to make it, and so having the time and the resolve was a problem as far as taking such firm stands on the issues. Now, I can sign petitions, write our elected officials and feel that there is a way to make a difference after all, as sometimes, (but not always) we hear our signatures being presented to those in power has indeed swayed stances.

The thing is, it's as if Cheney and Bush have found Pandora's Box once again, and let out more of the worlds woes. They have shown their successors that there are no consequences for the worst of attocities, that they won't be held accountable by our courts, or in public opinion for the laws they've broken; that the American people could care less about what they're doing abroad, as long as it doesn't change how we ourselves are living.

Now that the policies and the wars they've waging are costing lost jobs, lost wages, lost homes, high grocery prices, and lost dollar bills at the gas pumps, now we're hearing the squawking, loud and clear, but when it was only hurting others, not we Americans, we really didn't care. Politicians have seen this and have run roughshod over all of us due to our complacency. Our lack of concern and involvement will come home, and has come home, to bite us. Will we now do something about it? Or will we just let things stand as they are, showing successive men and women, who will hold seats of power, just what is possible; that they can get away with anything especially if Americans are kept in the dark by the press and are allowed to prosper?

With revelations about Rove, Cheney, Bush, Condi Rice and others having supposedly obstructed justice, they say that there's now an open door for prosecution. I'm not holding my breath as those on the hill who have called for impeachment hearings have been left begging, shut out and off.

[Saundra Hummer]

.
^^^^^^^
And Bush and McCain don't think we need a G.I. bill: 'Army suicides reported at 2-decade high; Pentagon officials say 108 soldiers committed suicide last year, highest since 1990' 5/30

http://www.buzzflash.com

Army suicides reported at 2-decade high
Pentagon officials say 108 soldiers committed suicide last year, highest since 1990
PAULINE JELINEK
AP News
May 29, 2008 09:18 EST

Pentagon officials say there were fewer Army suicides last year than they had feared. But it was still the highest number in almost two decades.

Two defense officials said Thursday that 108 troops committed suicide in 2007, the most since 1990. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the full report on the deaths wasn't being released until later Thursday.

Preliminary figures released in January showed as many as 121 troops killed themselves, but a number of the deaths were still being investigated then.

Suicides have been rising. The 108 last year followed 102 in 2006 and 85 in 2005.

The increases come despite a host of efforts to improve the mental health of a force stressed by lengthy and repeated deployments to Iraq.

Source: AP News
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/2008/05/army_suicides_reported_at_2dec.php
^^^ .

[Saundra Hummer]

.
. . . . . Reuters Blogs
Tales from the Trail
Tracking the 2008 U.S. campaign
Bush’s laws will be scrutinized if I become president, Obama saysMay 28th, 2008

Post a comment (108)Posted by: Deborah Charles
Tags: Tales from the Trail: 2008, 2008 elections, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Justice Department, U.S. constitution, white house hopefuls
DENVER - Maybe it’s his background teaching constitutional law.

If elected president, Democratic White House hopeful Barack Obama said one of the first things he wants to do is ensure the constitutionality of all the laws and executive orders passed while Republican President George W. Bush has been in office.

Those that don’t pass muster will be overturned, he said.

During a fund-raiser in Denver, Obama — a former constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago Law School — was asked what he hoped to accomplish during his first 100 days in office.

“I would call my attorney general in and review every single executive order issued by George Bush and overturn those laws or executive decisions that I feel violate the constitution,” said Obama

Other goals for his first 100 days: work out a plan to withdraw troops from Iraq; make progress on alternative energy plans and launch legislation to reform the health care system.

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage

Photo credit: Reuters/Rick Wilking (Obama talks to students during a visit to a school in Thornton, CO) Go on-site to view photo, as well as the several comments, much of it isn't kind.
http://blogs.reuters.com/trail08/2008/05/28/bushs-laws-will-be-scrutinized-if-i-become-president-obama-says/ . .
....... A recent compromise offered by Republican Senator Kit Bond would create loopholes for Bush to engage in unchecked spying on Americans, and could cut off lawsuits against telecom companies that broke the law.

Tell your representative to demand accountability and reject bad spying compromises.

Dear ACLU Supporter,

It’s okay to break the law if the President tells you it’s okay.

That’s the outrageous proposition at the heart of a new FISA “compromise” that Republican Senator Kit Bond is pushing on Capitol Hill.

His goal: to let off the hook telecommunications companies that willfully cooperated with illegal spying.

Senator Bond wants to bury lawsuits filed against telecom companies in a secret court. And, when they get there, he wants cases dismissed if the companies can show that the President gave them a note saying his request for customer information was legal.

Tell your representative: Just because the president says it's legal doesn't make it so!

Over and over, you and the ACLU have drawn a clear bottom line for Congress. We’re demanding:

Real accountability for telecommunications companies that broke the law.
No government spying on Americans without an individual warrant.
So far, we’ve persuaded Democratic leaders in the House to hold the line.

But now, some Democrats who want to look tough on national security are getting nervous, and they’re being tempted to support this flawed “compromise” spying bill.

Senator Bond’s proposal wouldn’t actually look at whether telecom companies broke the law; it would just look at what the Bush administration told telecom companies was the law. Legitimate cases against telecom companies could be dismissed by a secret court, simply because the Bush administration issued a sham certification.

Don’t let it happen. Your representative needs to hear from you now before Congress comes back to work next week. Tell your representative you demand accountability.

Thanks for all you do in defense of freedom.

Sincerely,


Caroline Fredrickson, Director
ACLU Washington Legislative Office

© ACLU, 125 Broad Street, 18th Floor New York, NY 10004
Go to this URL to send your message, there's a form to fill out, their letter, or you can send your own thoughts. Just click on the following URL:

https://secure.aclu.org/site/Advocacy?pagename=homepage&id=911&page=UserAction&JServSessionIdr007=yt1zkarpb2.app23a
. .

[Saundra Hummer]

.
. . . . . . . . . George Bush Authorized the Leak of Valerie Wilson’s IdentityBy: emptywheel Thursday May 29, 2008 7:08 am Scottie McC doesn't know it yet. But that's basically what he revealed this morning on the Today Show (h/t Rayne).
During the interview, Scottie revealed the two things that really pissed him off with the Bush Administration. First, being set up to lie by Karl Rove and Scooter Libby. And second, learning that Bush had--himself--authorized the selective leaking of the NIE.

Scottie McC: But the other defining moment was in early April 2006, when I learned that the President had secretly declassified the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq for the Vice President and Scooter Libby to anonymously disclose to reporters. And we had been out there talking about how seriously the President took the selective leaking of classified information. And here we were, learning that the President had authorized the very same thing we had criticized.

Viera: Did you talk to the President and say why are you doing this?

Scottie McC: Actually, I did. I talked about the conversation we had. I walked onto Air Force One, it was right after an event we had, it was down in the south, I believe it was North Carolina. And I walk onto Air Force One and a reporter had yelled a question to the President trying to ask him a question about this revelation that had come out during the legal proceedings. The revelation was that it was the President who had authorized, or, enable Scooter Libby to go out there and talk about this information. And I told the President that that's what the reporter was asking. He was saying that you, yourself, was the one that authorized the leaking of this information. And he said "yeah, I did." And I was kinda taken aback.

Now, for the most part, this is not new. We have known (since I first reported it here) that Scooter Libby testified that, after Libby told Dick Cheney he couldn't leak the information Cheney had ordered him to leak to Judy Miller because it was classified, Cheney told Libby he had gotten the President to authorize the declassification of that information.

Thus far, though, we only had Dick Cheney's word that he had actually asked Bush to declassify this information. We didn't have Bush's confirmation that he had actually declassified the information. In fact, we've had Dick Cheney's claims that he--Dick--had insta-declassified via his super secret pixie dust declassification powers.

But now we've got George Bush, confirming that he, the President of the United States, authorized the leaks of "this information."

Now, though Scottie refers, obliquely, to "this information," he explicitly refers only to the NIE. But as I've described over and over again, it's not just the NIE Bush authorized Dick to order Libby to leak.

As a review, here's what Libby's NIE lies are all about. This is all documented in this post, and here is the court transcript in which most of this is revealed.

Scooter Libby has instructions in his notes to leak something to Judy Miller on July 8, 2003
When questioned about the notation, Libby claimed the instructions related to the NIE
Libby went further to make certain claims about the NIE leak--that the leak was authorized by Dick Cheney and George Bush, that such an authorization was totally unique in his career, and that Libby was so worried about leaking the NIE to Judy that he double checked to make sure he was authorized to do so
Libby later made claims that directly contradicted these assertions--most importantly, even though Libby claims the Judy leak was totally unique in his career, he also leaked the NIE to three other people: Bob Woodward, a journalist [David Sanger] on July 2, and the WSJ
Also, in spite of the fact that Libby says he was really worried about getting authorization to leak the NIE to Judy, he's not really sure whether he was authorized to leak the NIE to Woodward; his concern about the leak to Judy only extended to whatever he leaked to Judy
In short, Libby is almost certainly lying about what he was authorized to leak to Judy on July 8, 2003, in a meeting where Judy Miller admits he talked about Valerie Plame, and where Libby tried to get her to falsely attribute the story.

At this point, Scottie McC is still accepting Scooter Libby's lies, though I suspect he sees the dangerous frailty of them. With Bush's clear admission to Scottie that he was in the loop, and the evidence that, subsequent to receiving an order from Cheney (authorized by Bush) to leak classified information to Judy Miller, Libby leaked Valerie Wilson's identity, the circumstantial evidence shows the President was directly involved in the deliberate outing of a CIA spy. The only question now is whether Bush realized he authorized the leak of Valerie's identity, in addition to a bunch of other classified documents.

Think of how much sense this makes. We have evidence that George Bush ordered Libby to respond to Joe Wilson on June 9, 2003. We now have Bush's own confirmation that he authorized the leak Libby made to Judy Miller on July 8, 2003--which included the leak of Valerie Wilson's identity. We know on July 10, Condi told Stephen Hadley that Bush "was comfortable" with the response the White House was making towards Wilson. And we know that--when Cheney forced Scottie McC to exonerate Libby publicly that fall, he did so by reminding people that "The Pres[ident] [asked Libby] to stick his head in the meat-grinder." We know that Libby's lawyers tried desperately to prevent a full discussion of the NIE lies to be presented at trial. And we know that--after those NIE lies did not come out, for the most part (though one juror told me that NIE story was obviously false, even with the limited information they received)--the President commuted Libby's sentence on July 2, 2007.

Share This Spotlight
158 Responses to “George Bush Authorized the Leak of Valerie Wilson’s Identity”
Leen May 29th, 2008 at 7:13 am 1
I think Scottie knows exactly what he is doing. Just too bad it has taken him so long.Did MI’s April 19 District Conventions Just Become a Clusterf^#k Too?
On the Serendipity of Mis-Readings »

Go on-site to view the numerous and oftentimes interesting contributions to this post, as well as other articles of interest.

http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2008/05/29/george-bush-authorized-the-leak-of-valerie-wilsons-identity/ . . .

[Saundra Hummer]

Ohhhh, Harvey Korman has died.

Wasn't he just great?

He died at UCLA Medical Center. He was 81.

He gave us a lot of joy, and in doing so he won an Emmy for his staring role on The Carol Burnett Show.

A sad day, however, he gave us so much for a long time. I know there will be posts made about him on a thread just for him, but thought I would put my thoughts here for now.

[RonF]

Ohhhh, Harvey Korman has died.

Wasn't he just great?

He died at UCLA Medical Center. He was 81.

He gave us a lot of joy, and in doing so he won an Emmy for his staring role on The Carol Burnett Show.

A sad day, however, he gave us so much for a long time. I know there will be posts made about him on a thread just for him, but thought I would put my thoughts here for now.

I agree, Sandi. He was brilliant and very, very funny.

[Saundra Hummer]

.^V^V^V^ Foreclosure Phil
Years before Phil Gramm was a McCain campaign adviser and a lobbyist for a Swiss bank at the center of the housing credit crisis, he pulled a sly maneuver in the Senate that helped create today's subprime meltdown."
David Corn"
May 28, 2008"

Who's to blame for the biggest financial catastrophe of our time? There are plenty of culprits, but one candidate for lead perp is former Sen. Phil Gramm. Eight years ago, as part of a decades-long anti-regulatory crusade, Gramm pulled a sly legislative maneuver that greased the way to the multibillion-dollar subprime meltdown. Yet has Gramm been banished from the corridors of power? Reviled as the villain who bankrupted Middle America? Hardly. Now a well-paid executive at a Swiss bank, Gramm cochairs Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign and advises the Republican candidate on economic matters. He's been mentioned as a possible Treasury secretary should McCain win. That's right: A guy who helped screw up the global financial system could end up in charge of US economic policy. Talk about a market failure.

Gramm's long been a handmaiden to Big Finance. In the 1990s, as chairman of the Senate banking committee, he routinely turned down Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Arthur Levitt's requests for more money to police Wall Street; during this period, the sec's workload shot up 80 percent, but its staff grew only 20 percent. Gramm also opposed an sec rule that would have prohibited accounting firms from getting too close to the companies they audited—at one point, according to Levitt's memoir, he warned the sec chairman that if the commission adopted the rule, its funding would be cut. And in 1999, Gramm pushed through a historic banking deregulation bill that decimated Depression-era firewalls between commercial banks, investment banks, insurance companies, and securities firms—setting off a wave of merger mania.

But Gramm's most cunning coup on behalf of his friends in the financial services industry—friends who gave him millions over his 24-year congressional career—came on December 15, 2000. It was an especially tense time in Washington. Only two days earlier, the Supreme Court had issued its decision on Bush v. Gore. President Bill Clinton and the Republican-controlled Congress were locked in a budget showdown. It was the perfect moment for a wily senator to game the system. As Congress and the White House were hurriedly hammering out a $384-billion omnibus spending bill, Gramm slipped in a 262-page measure called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. Written with the help of financial industry lobbyists and cosponsored by Senator Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), the chairman of the agriculture committee, the measure had been considered dead—even by Gramm. Few lawmakers had either the opportunity or inclination to read the version of the bill Gramm inserted. "Nobody in either chamber had any knowledge of what was going on or what was in it," says a congressional aide familiar with the bill's history.

It's not exactly like Gramm hid his handiwork—far from it. The balding and bespectacled Texan strode onto the Senate floor to hail the act's inclusion into the must-pass budget package. But only an expert, or a lobbyist, could have followed what Gramm was saying. The act, he declared, would ensure that neither the sec nor the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (cftc) got into the business of regulating newfangled financial products called swaps—and would thus "protect financial institutions from overregulation" and "position our financial services industries to be world leaders into the new century."


It didn't quite work out that way. For starters, the legislation contained a provision—lobbied for by Enron, a generous contributor to Gramm—that exempted energy trading from regulatory oversight, allowing Enron to run rampant, wreck the California electricity market, and cost consumers billions before it collapsed. (For Gramm, Enron was a family affair. Eight years earlier, his wife, Wendy Gramm, as cftc chairwoman, had pushed through a rule excluding Enron's energy futures contracts from government oversight. Wendy later joined the Houston-based company's board, and in the following years her Enron salary and stock income brought between $915,000 and $1.8 million into the Gramm household.)

But the Enron loophole was small potatoes compared to the devastation that unregulated swaps would unleash. Credit default swaps are essentially insurance policies covering the losses on securities in the event of a default. Financial institutions buy them to protect themselves if an investment they hold goes south. It's like bookies trading bets, with banks and hedge funds gambling on whether an investment (say, a pile of subprime mortgages bundled into a security) will succeed or fail. Because of the swap-related provisions of Gramm's bill—which were supported by Fed chairman Alan Greenspan and Treasury secretary Larry Summers—a $62 trillion market (nearly four times the size of the entire US stock market) remained utterly unregulated, meaning no one made sure the banks and hedge funds had the assets to cover the losses they guaranteed.

In essence, Wall Street's biggest players (which, thanks to Gramm's earlier banking deregulation efforts, now incorporated everything from your checking account to your pension fund) ran a secret casino. "Tens of trillions of dollars of transactions were done in the dark," says University of San Diego law professor Frank Partnoy, an expert on financial markets and derivatives. "No one had a picture of where the risks were flowing." Betting on the risk of any given transaction became more important—and more lucrative—than the transactions themselves, Partnoy notes: "So there was more betting on the riskiest subprime mortgages than there were actual mortgages." Banks and hedge funds, notes Michael Greenberger, who directed the cftc's division of trading and markets in the late 1990s, "were betting the subprimes would pay off and they would not need the capital to support their bets."

These unregulated swaps have been at "the heart of the subprime meltdown," says Greenberger. "I happen to think Gramm did not know what he was doing. I don't think a member in Congress had read the 262-page bill or had thought of the cataclysm it would cause." In 1998, Greenberger's division at the cftc proposed applying regulations to the burgeoning derivatives market. But, he says, "all hell broke loose. The lobbyists for major commercial banks and investment banks and hedge funds went wild. They all wanted to be trading without the government looking over their shoulder."

Now, belatedly, the feds are swooping in—but not to regulate the industry, only to bail it out, as they did in engineering the March takeover of investment banking giant Bear Stearns by JPMorgan Chase, fearing the firm's collapse could trigger a dominoes-like crash of the entire credit derivatives market.

No one in Washington apologizes for anything, so it's no surprise that Gramm has failed to issue any mea culpa. Post-Enron, says Greenberger, the senator even called him to say, "You're going around saying this was my fault—and it's not my fault. I didn't intend this."

Whether or not Gramm had bothered to ponder the potential downsides of his commodities legislation, having helped set off an industry free-for-all, he reaped the rewards. In 2003, he left the Senate to take a highly lucrative job at ubs, Switzerland's largest bank, which had been able to acquire investment house PaineWebber due to his banking deregulation bill. He would soon be lobbying Congress, the Fed, and the Treasury Department for ubs on banking and mortgage matters. There was a moment of poetic justice when ubs became one of the subprime crisis' top losers, writing down $37 billion as of this spring—an amount equal to its previous four years of profits combined. In a report explaining how it had managed to mess up so grandly, ubs noted that two-thirds of its losses were the fault of collateralized debt obligations—securities backed largely by subprime instruments—and that credit default swaps had been "key to the growth" of its out-of-control cdo business. (Gramm declined to comment for this article.)

Gramm's record as a reckless deregulator has not affected his rating as a Republican economic expert. Sen. John McCain has relied on him for policy advice, especially, according to the campaign, on housing matters. The two have been buddies ever since they served together in the House in the 1980s; in 1996, McCain chaired Gramm's flop of a presidential campaign. (Gramm spent $21 million and earned only 10 delegates during the gop primaries.) In 2005, McCain told a Wall Street Journal columnist that Gramm was his economic guru. Two years later, Gramm wrote a piece for the Journal extolling McCain as a modern-day Abraham Lincoln, and he's hailed McCain's love of tax cuts and free trade. Media accounts have identified Gramm as a contender for the top slot at the Treasury Department if McCain reaches the White House. "If McCain gets in," frets Lynn Turner, a former chief sec accountant, "we'll have more of the same deregulatory mess. I like John McCain, but given what I know about Phil Gramm, I wouldn't vote for McCain."

As a thriving bank exec and presidential adviser, Gramm has defied a prime economic principle: Bad products are driven out of the market. In John McCain, he has gained an important customer, so his stock has gone up in value. And there's no telling when the Gramm bubble will burst.

Subprime 1-2-3
Don't understand credit default swaps? Don't worry—neither does Congress. Herewith, a step-by-step outline of the subprime risk betting game. —Casey MinerSubprime borrower: Has a few overdue credit card bills; goes to a storefront lender owned by major bank; takes out a $100,000 home-equity loan at 11 percent interest
Lending bank: Assuming housing prices will only go up, and that investors will want to buy mortgage loan packages, makes as many subprime loans as it can
Investment bank: Packages subprime mortgages into bundles called collateralized debt obligations, or cdos, then sells those cdos to eager investors. Goes to insurer to get protection for those investors, thus passing the default risk to the insurer through a "credit default swap."
Insurer: Thinking that default risk is low, agrees to cover more money than it can pay out, in exchange for a premium
Rating agency: On basis of original quality of loans and insurance policy they are "wrapped" in, issues a rating signaling certain slices of the cdo are low risk (aaa), medium risk (bbb), or high risk (ccc)
Investor: Borrows more money from investment bank to load up on cdo slices; makes money from interest payments made to the "pool" of loans. No one loses—as long as no one tries to cash in on the insurance.
David Corn is Mother Jones' Washington, D.C. bureau chief.
This article has been made possible by the Foundation for National Progress, the Investigative Fund of Mother Jones, and .....

© 2008" The Foundation for National Progress
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2008/07/foreclosure-phil.html
^V^V^V^V^ ,

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~~~~~~~
"The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly...it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over."

Joseph Goebbels
Nazi Propaganda Minister ~~~
"The process [of mass-media deception] has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt.... To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies - all this is indispensably necessary."

George Orwell
In the book 1984
~~~
"Like the effect of advertising upon the customer, the methods of political propaganda tend to increase the feeling of insignificance of the individual voter"

Erich Fromm
Psychoanalyst & social philosopher
1900-1980

~~~
"Half a truth is often a great lie"

Benjamin Franklin
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. . . . . . . .Is Bush Becoming Irrelevant?

By
Patrick J. Buchanan

30/05/08 "Human Events" -- - After losing both houses of Congress in the 1994 election, Bill Clinton expostulated: The president of the United States is not irrelevant!

On learning his trusted aide from Texas Scott McClellan has denounced as an "unnecessary war" the same Iraq war McClellan defended from the White House podium, George Bush must feel as Clinton did.

The synchronized savagery of the attacks on McClellan as turncoat suggests he drew blood. For what he has done is offer confirmation to the president's war critics, from within the White House inner circle, that Bush's motive in going to war was not a clear and present danger of attack by Iraq with weapons of mass destruction, but to advance a Bush crusade to impose democracy on the Middle East.

Neoconservative ideology, not U.S. national interests, McClellan is saying, motivated Bush to launch one of the longest and most divisive wars in U.S. history.

When loyalists defect and seek to profit from that defection, it is usually a sign of a failing presidency. And, indeed, events suggest that history is passing Bush by.

Despite the administration's designation of Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorist organizations, and of Syria and Iran as state sponsors of terror with whom we do not negotiate, America's clients are ignoring America.

Israel has ignored Bush's demand that it stop building and expanding settlements on a West Bank that is to be the heartland of a Palestinian state. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has been secretly negotiating with Syria for the return of the Golan Heights in exchange for peace.

When America refused to play honest broker between Jerusalem and Damascus, Turkey, at Israel's request, stepped into the role.

The pro-American Lebanese government of Prime Minister Siniora has negotiated a truce and power-sharing arrangement with Hezbollah, giving that militant Shiite movement and party veto power in the Beirut government. Egypt is negotiating with Hamas for a truce in the Israeli-Gaza war and to effect the exchange of a captured Israeli solider held by Hamas for Hamas fighters held in Israel.

The Iranian Revolutionary Guard, designated a terrorist organization by the Senate, helped to arrange the ceasefire between government forces and the Mahdi Army in Basra and Sadr City. While the United States has used the roughest of language to denounce Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president has been received as an honored guest by the Iraqi government we support and by the Ayatollah Sistani, who has yet to meet a high-ranking American.

When Bush went to the Middle East to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Israel as the Zionist he has become, he was criticized by a Palestinian leader who survives on U.S. aid. When he went to Riyadh to plead for an increase in the flow of oil, he got a token concession from the king.

In Pakistan, the new government has been negotiating a truce with the radicalized frontier provinces, which would leave the Taliban with a privileged sanctuary from which to prepare their annual offensives to overthrow the government in Kabul and expel the Americans, as their fathers expelled the Russians.

As Russia and China move closer together to oppose U.S. missile defenses and the U.S. presence, military and economic, in the Caucasus and Central Asia, Latin America seems to be going its own leftward way. The halcyon days of the Alliance for Progress are long gone.

The world seems to be waiting for Bush to depart and for the next American president. For the foreign policy differences between John McCain and Barack Obama are as real and stark as they have been since the Reagan-Carter election of 1980, or the Nixon-McGovern election of 1972.

Looking back on the years since 9-11, it is hard to give the Bush foreign policy passing grades. We pushed NATO eastward and alienated Russia. We have 140,000 Army and Marine Corps troops tied down in Iraq in a war now in its sixth year, from which our NATO allies have all extricated themselves. We have another war going in Afghanistan, where the situation is as grave as it has been since we went in.

The Bush democracy crusade was put on the shelf after producing election triumphs for Hamas, Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. And the Bush Doctrine of preventive war, after Iraq, appears to be headed there, as well.

America remains the first economic and military power on earth. But after seven years of Bush, we no longer inspire the awe or hopes we once did. We are no longer the world hegemonic power of the neocons' depiction. And the reason is that Bush embraced their utopian ideology of democratic empire and listened to their siren's call to be the Churchill of his age.

Of Bush, it may be said he was a far better politician and candidate than his father, but as a statesman and world leader, he could not carry the old man's loafers.

Mr. Buchanan is a nationally syndicated columnist and author of "The Death of the West," "The Great Betrayal," "A Republic, Not an Empire" and "Where the Right Went Wrong."
Copyright © 2008 HUMAN EVENTS.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info. . . . . .

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A
VIDEO
Isn't this the cleric who has been the voice of moderation if not reason?

He has taken all he can it seems.

Will Sistani End The War In Iraq? By
Pepe Escobar

According to an AP dispatch, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani is inclined to issue a series of fatwas declaring what amounts to a defensive jihad against the occupying US troops. The Ayatollah's spokesman Abdul Mahdi Karbala'i, recently said that Sistani was against the Maliki government offensive on the Mahdi Army in Basra and Sadr City.

Posted 27/05/08

Pepe Escobar, born in Brazil is the roving correspondent for Asia Times and an analyst for The Real News Network. He's been a foreign correspondent since 1985, based in London, Milan, Los Angeles, Paris, Singapore, and Bangkok. Since the late 1990s, he has specialized in covering the arc from the Middle East to Central Asia, including the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He has made frequent visits to Iran and is the author of Globalistan and also Red Zone Blues: A Snapshot of Baghdad During the Surge both published by Nimble Books in 2007.

There are oppoing viewpoints and confirming news articles all over the web on this one, so it's hard to know what will come of this. We'll just have to sit back and wonder. SRH

Click on the following link to gain access to the VIDEO
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article20000.htm
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.^^^^^^^Army Judge Is Replaced for Trial of Detainee

By
William Glaberson
The New York Times
Saturday 31 May 2008

In this courtroom sketch, Omar Khadr attends his war-crimes trial in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba Thursday, May 8, 2008. Khadr's defense attorney, Navy Lt. Cmdr William Kuebler, calls the sudden replacement of the military judge in Khadr's case, Col. Peter E. Brownback III, "very odd."
(Photo: Janet Hamlin / Courtesy CBC)

Go on-site to view:

http://www.truthout.org/article/army-judge-is-replaced-trial-detainee
The chief judge at Guantánamo replaced the military judge in one of the most closely watched war crimes cases on Thursday, creating a new controversy in the military commission system and the potential for new delays.

The decision to replace the judge, Col. Peter E. Brownback III, came without explanation from the chief military judge, Col. Ralph H. Kohlmann. Judge Brownback has been presiding over pretrial proceedings in the prosecution of Omar Ahmed Khadr, a 21-year-old Canadian charged with the killing of an American serviceman in Afghanistan.

Pentagon spokesmen said Judge Brownback, a retired Army judge who was recalled to hear Guantánamo cases in 2004, would return to retirement as a result of "a mutual decision" between the judge and the Army.

But defense lawyers and critics of Guantánamo said there had been no warning of the change and suggested that he had been removed because of a recent ruling that was a rebuke to prosecutors.

During a proceeding on May 8, Judge Brownback expressed irritation that military prosecutors had failed to turn over records of Mr. Khadr's incarceration to defense lawyers. He threatened to stop pretrial proceedings if the records were not supplied by May 22. They met that deadline.

At the time, Judge Brownback said he had been "badgered and beaten and bruised" by the chief military prosecutor in the case, Maj. Jeffrey D. Groharing, to move the case toward a trial quickly.

Mr. Khadr's military defense lawyer, Lt. Cmdr. William C. Kuebler, on Friday called the replacement of the judge "very odd."

"The judge who was frustrating the government's forward progress in the Khadr case," Commander Kuebler said, "is suddenly gone."

A trial had been expected as soon as this summer.

Major Groharing said on Friday that the prosecution had always acted ethically and "didn't have anything to do with a new judge being assigned to this case."

Some of Judge Brownback's rulings had been setbacks for Mr. Khadr, including a decision in April that rejected a central argument of the defense that Mr. Khadr, who was 15 when he was first detained, should not be prosecuted but granted protection as a child soldier.

Jennifer Daskal, an observer for Human Rights Watch at Guantánamo, said the change of judges suggested "political meddling" in the process.

In a terse e-mail message to a court clerk, Judge Kohlmann simply appointed a new judge, Col. Patrick Parrish.

There are no listed telephone numbers for the chambers of Guantánamo judges and a spokesman for the Office of Military Commissions at the Pentagon, Capt. André Kok, said he could provide no way of reaching Judge Brownback. ^^^^^^^^^^^ .

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.........The Great Oil Swindle
How much did the Fed really know?
By
Mike Whitney

30/05/08 "ICH" -- - The Commodity Futures and Trading Commission (CFTC) is investigating trading in oil futures to determine whether the surge in prices to record levels is the result of manipulation or fraud. They might want to take a look at wheat, rice and corn futures while they're at it. The whole thing is a hoax cooked up by the investment banks and hedge funds who are trying to dig their way out of the trillion dollar mortgage-backed securities (MBS) mess that they created by turning garbage loans into securities. That scam blew up in their face last August and left them scrounging for handouts from the Federal Reserve. Now the billions of dollars they're getting from the Fed is being diverted into commodities which is destabilizing the world economy; driving gas prices to the moon and triggering food riots across the planet.

For months we've been told that the soaring price of oil has been the result of Peak Oil, fighting in Iraq, attacks on oil facilities in Nigeria, labor problems in Norway, and (the all-time favorite)growth in China. It's all baloney. Just like Goldman Sachs prediction of $200 per barrel oil is baloney. If oil is about to skyrocket then why has G-Sax kept a neutral rating on some of its oil holdings like Exxon Mobile? Could it be that they know that oil is just another mega-inflated equity bubble---like housing, corporate bonds and dot.com stocks—that is about to crash to earth as soon as the big players grab a parachute?

There are three things that are driving up the price of oil: the falling dollar, speculation and buying on margin.

The dollar is tanking because of the Federal Reserve's low interest monetary policies have kept interest rates below the rate of inflation for most of the last decade. Add that to the $700 billion current account deficit and a National Debt that has increased from $5.8 trillion when Bush first took office to over $9 trillion today and it's a wonder the dollar hasn't gone “Poof” already.

According to a January 4 editorial in the Wall Street Journal: “If the dollar had remained 'as good as gold' since 2001, oil today would be selling at about $30 per barrel, not $99. (today $126 per barrel) The decline of the dollar against gold and oil suggests a US monetary that is supplying too many dollars.” Wall Street Journal 1-4-08

The price of oil has more than quadrupled since 2001, from roughly $30 per barrel to $126, WITHOUT ANY DISRUPTIONS TO SUPPLY. There's no shortage; it's just gibberish.

As far as “buying on margin” consider this summary from author William Engdahl:
“A conservative calculation is that at least 60% of today’s $128 per barrel price of crude oil comes from unregulated futures speculation by hedge funds, banks and financial groups using the London ICE Futures and New York NYMEX futures exchanges and uncontrolled inter-bank or Over-The-Counter trading to avoid scrutiny. US margin rules of the government’s Commodity Futures Trading Commission allow speculators to buy a crude oil futures contract on the Nymex, by having to pay only 6% of the value of the contract. At today's price of $128 per barrel, that means a futures trader only has to put up about $8 for every barrel. He borrows the other $120. This extreme “leverage” of 16 to 1 helps drive prices to wildly unrealistic levels and offset bank losses in sub-prime and other disasters at the expense of the overall population.”

So the investment banks and their trading partners at the hedge funds can game the system for a mere 8 bucks per barrel or 16 to 1 leverage. Not bad, eh?

Is it possible that gambling on oil futures might be a temptation for banks that are already underwater from a trillion dollars worth of mortgage-related deals that have “gone south” leaving the banking system essentially bankrupt?

And if the banks and hedgies are not playing this game, then where is the money coming from? I have compiled charts and graphs that show that nearly two-thirds of the big investment banks' revenue came from the securitization of commercial and residential real estate loans. That market is frozen. Besides, this is not just a matter of “loan delinquencies” or MBS that have to be written off. The banks are "revenue starved". How are they filling the coffers? They're either neck-deep in interest rate swaps, derivatives trading, or gaming the futures market. Which is it?

Of course, there is one other possibility, but if that possibility turned out to be right than it would cast doubt on the legitimacy of the entire financial system. In fact, it would prove that the system is being rigged from the top-down by our friends at the Banking Politburo, the Federal Reserve. Here goes:

What if the investment banks are trading their worthless MBS and CDOs at the Fed's auction facilities and using the money ($400 billion) to drive up the price of raw materials like rice, corn, wheat, and oil?

Could it be? Could the Fed really be looking the other way so it can bail out its banking buddies while they drive prices skyward?

If it is true; (and I suspect it is) it hasn't done much good. As the Associated Press reported yesterday:

“The Federal Reserve announced Thursday that it will make a fresh batch of short-term cash loans available to squeezed banks as part of an ongoing effort to ease stressed credit markets. The Fed said it will conduct three auctions in June, with each one making $75 billion available in short-term cash loans. Banks can bid for a slice of the available funds. It would mark the latest round in a program that the Fed launched in December to help banks overcome credit problems so they will keep lending to customers.”

Another $225 billion for the bankers and not a dime for the struggling homeowner! The Fed is bankrupting the country with their permanent rotating loans to keep reckless speculators from going under. So much for moral hazard.

As far as speculation, there is ample evidence that the system is being manipulated. According to MarketWatch:

“Speculative activity in commodity markets has grown "enormously" over the past several years, the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee said in a news release. It pointed out that in five years, from 2003 to 2008, investment in the index funds tied to commodities has grown by 20-fold -- to $260 billion from $13 billion.”

And here's a revealing clip from the testimony of Michael W. Masters of Masters Capital Management, LLC, who addressed the issue of “Commodities Speculation” before the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs this week:

“Today, Index Speculators are pouring billions of dollars into the commodities futures markets, speculating that commodity prices will increase. ...In the popular press the explanation given most often for rising oil prices is the increased demand for oil from China. According to the DOE, annual Chinese demand for petroleum has increased over the last five years from 1.88 billion barrels to 2.8 billion barrels, an increase of 920 million barrels.8 Over the same five-year period, Index Speculatorsʼ demand for petroleum futures has increased by 848 million barrels. THE INCREASE IN DEMAND FROM INDEX SPECULATORS IS ALMOST EQUAL TO THE INCREASE IN DEMAND FROM CHINA.
Index Speculators have now stockpiled, via the futures market, the equivalent of 1.1 billion barrels of petroleum, effectively adding eight times as much oil to their own stockpile as the United States has added to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve over the last five years.

Today, in many commodities futures markets, they are the single largest force.15 The huge growth in their demand has gone virtually undetected by classically-trained economists who almost never analyze demand in futures markets.

As money pours into the markets, two things happen concurrently: the markets expand and prices rise. One particularly troubling aspect of Index Speculator demand is that it actually increases the more prices increase. This explains the accelerating rate at which commodity futures prices (and actual commodity prices) are increasing. The CFTC has taken deliberate steps to allow CERTAIN SPECULATORS VIRTUALLY UNLIMITED ACCESS TO THE COMMODITIES FUTURES MARKETS. The CFTC has granted Wall Street banks an exemption from speculative position limits when these banks hedge over-the-counter swaps transactions. This has effectively opened a loophole for unlimited speculation. When Index Speculators enter into commodity index swaps, which 85-90% of them do, they face no speculative position limits.... The result is a gross distortion in data that effectively hides the full impact of Index Speculation.” (Thanks to Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis; the one “indispensable” financial blog on the Internet)

Masters adds that the CFTC is pressing to make “Index Speculators exempt from all position limits” so they can make “unlimited” bets on the futures which are wreaking havoc on the global economy and pushing millions towards starvation. Of course, these things pale in comparison to the higher priority of fatting the bottom line of the parasitic investor class.

Brimming oil tankers are presently sitting off the coasts of Iran and Louisiana. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve has been filled. Demand is flat. The world's biggest consumer of energy (guess who?) is cutting back . As CNN reports:

“At a time when gas prices are at an all-time high, Americans have curtailed their driving at a historic rate. The Department of Transportation said figures from March show the steepest decrease in driving ever recorded. Compared with March a year earlier, Americans drove an estimated 4.3 percent less -- that's 11 billion fewer miles, the DOT's Federal Highway Administration said Monday, calling it "the sharpest yearly drop for any month in FHWA history." (CNN)

The great oil crunch is another fabricated crisis; another "smoke and mirrors" fiasco; another Enron-type shell-game engineered by banksters and hedge fund managers. Once again, the bloody footprints can be traced right back to the front door of the Federal Reserve. Don't expect help from the regulators either; they've all been replaced with business reps like Harvey Pitt or Hank Paulson. The only time anyone in the Bush administration finds their conscience is when they're offered a multi-million dollar “tell all” book deal.

Can you hear me, Scotty?

Click on the following link to gain access to Information Clearing House's web site and it's many articles, archives, and to sign up for their newsletter. Check out their anchor articles while there, they're the reports in the large yellow box. Then there are the war stats, civilian and military, as well as it's monetary costs to the nation and your own communities.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article20011.htm ...............
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An elder Cherokee Native American was teaching his grandchildren about life. He said to them, "A fight is going on inside me...It is a terrible fight, and it is between two wolves. One wolf represents fear, anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, pride and superiority. The other wolf stands for joy, peace, love, hope, sharing, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, friendship, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. This same fight is going on inside of you and every other person too."

They thought about it for a minute and then one child asked his grandfather, "Which wolf will win?" The old Cherokee simply replied..."The one I feed."
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"The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy: that is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness." :

John Kenneth Galbraith
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...... . ......Who Is John McCain?
Opinion
By
Michael Tomasky
New York Review of Books
Thursday 12 June 2008

Republican presidential candidate, Senator John McCain, stands with his wife Cindy. They married in May 1980 and moved to Arizona. Cindy's father, Jim Hensley, ran the country's largest Anheuser-Busch distributorship, and meant he would have the money and connections to launch the political career he had been coveting. (Photo: AP / Jeff Chiu)

Here are three books on John McCain which may or may not paint a true picture of what his political motivations have been and what they will be. SRH
.....Free Ride: John McCain and the Media
.....by David Brock and Paul Waldman
.....Anchor, 218 pp., $13.95 (paper)

......The Real McCain"
......Why Conservatives Don't Trust Himand why Independents Shouldn't
. ......by Cliff Schecter
. ......PoliPoint, 186 pp., $14.95 (paper)

..... McCain:The Myth of a Maverick
. .....by Matt Welch
. .....Palgrave Macmillan, 226 pp., $27.95

It is little remembered today that the political career of John Sidney McCain III, a career now thoroughly laundered in mythology, began with the help of several fortuities. In 1973 he returned from his five and a half years of captivity in North Vietnam to Washington, or technically Arlington, Virginia, which had been his childhood home for more years than any other single place as he followed his father, a celebrated four-star admiral, on the elder McCain's naval assignments. He was one of 591 prisoners of war repatriated early that year as a result of Operation Homecoming, and was selected by the editors of US News & World Report as the one returning POW who would be given a thirteen-page spread in the magazine to describe his ordeal (having a famous father never hurts), which brought him the same kind of attention and acclaim that had earlier, for different purposes, been showered upon the young Hillary Diane Rodham and the young John Forbes Kerry.

By 1977 he held the post of naval liaison to Congress, his father's old position, and shortly thereafter attained the rank of captain. It was on Capitol Hill that he met and befriended important senators - Gary Hart of Colorado, William Cohen of Maine, and most of all John Tower of Texas, the buddy to whom he was closest during a period of his life that included its share of carousing and irreparably strained his marriage to his first wife, Carol. When asked to explain the dissolution of their marriage in the late 1970s, she said, "I attribute it more to John turning forty and wanting to be twenty-five again than I do to anything else."

But here was the first piece of luck, for his split from Carol enabled him to romance Cindy Hensley, an Arizonan seventeen years his junior whom he had met while vacationing in Honolulu in 1979 (he was separated) and with whom he was in love, he has written, by the end of their first evening together.

They married in May 1980, and from this union tumbled other fortuities. That she lived in Arizona meant that McCain would be moving to a state - with which he'd had even less association than Hillary Clinton had had with New York in 1999 - whose growing population would gain it an extra congressional seat after the 1980 census, a circumstance on which his eye was keenly fixed. Her background - her father, Jim, ran the country's largest Anheuser-Busch distributorship - meant he would have the money and connections to launch the political career he had been coveting since he started meeting those famous pols. McCain hardly knew a soul in Arizona, but already he was telling friends in 1981 that he would swoop into the new seat in 1982 and then succeed Barry Goldwater in the Senate when Goldwater retired.

Then, one piece of bad luck: the new district would be cut in Tucson, not Phoenix. But this was soon followed by the greatest fortuity of all. John Rhodes, the Phoenix Republican who was the House minority leader, unexpectedly announced his retirement. The McCains lived just outside the Rhodes district, but Cindy's money ensured that they were able to buy a house in it and move in immediately. During a primary campaign against three other Republicans, he was, inevitably, branded a carpetbagger and opportunist. Confronted with these allegations at a candidates' forum, he delivered a riposte that would win him the seat and would foreshadow the kind of rhetorical agility that has so impressed reporters. The point of his zinger of a last sentence was not lost on his audience even then:

Listen, pal. I spent twenty-two years in the Navy. My father was in the Navy. My grandfather was in the Navy. We in the military service tend to move a lot. We have to live in all parts of the country, all parts of the world. I wish I could have the luxury, like you, of growing up and living and spending my entire life in a nice place like the First District of Arizona, but I was doing other things. As a matter of fact, when I think about it now, the place I lived longest in my life was Hanoi.

As Matt Welch notes in McCain, this wasn't exactly true; but invoking northern Virginia, where he had actually lived for a combined decade or more, would hardly have put across the desired point. As McCain's career has shown, sometimes the narrative is far more powerful than mere facts.

Twenty-six years later, McCain has secured the Republican presidential nomination and launched his general election campaign, itself the result of even more happy coincidences - Rudy Giuliani's inexplicable decision to skip all the early contests, Mitt Romney's unsteadiness on the national stage, the absence of a consensus on a "real conservative" choice, and press reports suggesting that the initially unpopular troop surge in Iraq, on which he'd placed his bet in late 2006 when President Bush was considering the Iraq Study Group report, was beginning to achieve some success. This should by all rights be a Democratic year, but the Democrats have been locked in ferocious battle, ensuring that one final piece of good fortune awaits McCain in that he will in all likelihood face a black man who no longer "transcends race" in anything like the way he did a few months ago or, if she keeps fighting and somehow manages to pull it off, the country's most polarizing woman, who could secure her party's nomination only by alienating large sections of its base.

But as Arnold Palmer reportedly once said, "It's a funny thing, the more I practice, the luckier I get." McCain's career is undeniably built also upon skill and shrewdness unusual among contemporary American politicians. It's not that he's been an especially accomplished legislator, although passage of the McCain-Feingold Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act ("Bickra," in wonk-speak) took years and much resolve, as Elizabeth Drew shows in her engrossing Citizen McCain from 2002.[1] Nor has he been an especially energetic servant of his Arizona constituents. Welch even asserts that McCain "is infamous throughout his home state as someone who studiously avoids mixing with the little people."

But what McCain has been, of course, is a brilliant strategist of the culture of Washington, and particularly of the arbiters of conventional wisdom in the national press. "The press loves McCain," Chris Matthews said in 2006. "We're his base." McCain understands intuitively how reputations are built and maintained. As David Brock and Paul Waldman of the liberal nonprofit group Media Matters for America put it in Free Ride, McCain has "cracked the media code" of how to turn these ostensible adversaries into his allies and, on numerous occasions, even his apologists.

He became the press's darling in 1999 and 2000, during his first presidential run, the famous "Straight-Talk Express" days. He has since transformed himself into a very different and much more conventional conservative politician. But the fact of that transformation hasn't really taken hold yet in the national press. There is therefore the expectation - or, among liberals, fear - that the mass media will give McCain the benefit of every doubt against Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton. The tendency is already in evidence here and there - the proposed elimination of the federal gas tax for the summer, endorsed first by McCain and then by Clinton, resulted in Clinton receiving far more criticism for pandering than McCain did.

So the season has come for anti-McCain books from detractors. Whether the three under review here have any impact on the election discourse will depend, to some extent, on the course of events and the effectiveness of the Democratic fall campaign. But each of the three - all follow the same basic template of critically reassessing the stages of McCain's career - makes persuasive arguments that while there has been much to respect in McCain in the past, there remain today only shards and vestiges of that man; that in doing what he had to do to become the nominee of a party of orthodox conservatism, he has so sublimated his honorable instincts that they have all but atrophied. He's not only adopted domestic policy positions he'd long opposed, he has openly pandered to the conservative Republican base by supporting most of Bush's positions in legislation on the treatment of detainees.

The McCain myth, as we know, is built on the foundation of his five and a half years of captivity in Hoa Lo Prison, aka the "Hanoi Hilton." He was flying a bombing raid in October 1967; his plane was shot down, he parachuted into the middle of a lake in Hanoi, and, with two broken arms and one broken knee, swam to shore. He was stabbed and beaten - bone sticking out of his right knee - and taken to Hoa Lo. His captors did not set his fractures and tortured him regularly, trying to drag false admissions out of him. When they learned that he had a famous father - who was, by 1968, the commander of all US naval forces in the Pacific - they offered him an early release for PR purposes. Because military regulations held that captured prisoners must be released in the order in which they were captured, he refused, spending much of the remainder of his captivity in solitary confinement. It's a staggering story, told most grippingly, in my reading, by David Foster Wallace.[2]

It is also just the right tale of heroism for an unwanted war. If McCain had shot down the greatest number of North Vietnamese, who would celebrate him? If he had led a great raid, most people would be indifferent to him, or - worse - Seymour Hersh or some other investigative journalist would likely have found out by now that innocent women and children were slaughtered. It was by suffering in a cell, serving as a kind of metaphor for American suffering in a war most Americans gave up on early in his confinement, but at the same time holding fast to principle under the most unimaginable circumstances, thereby redeeming some notion of American honor in a dishonorable situation, that McCain became an American hero. Liberal opponents of the war, who seldom acknowledged the repressive brutality of the North Vietnamese regime, were put on the defensive by the story of how he was tortured.

The tale has had a particularly talismanic effect on Baby Boomer journalists, many of whom probably opposed the war when they were young, or did not serve, or both, and thus reflexively grant McCain great moral authority. Brock and Waldman write:

And since few of the reporters who cover him were themselves in the armed forces in Vietnam, there may be no small amount of guilt involved, or at least the belief that they have not earned the right to ask him critical questions. On a 2006 episode of Hardball, Bloomberg News reporter Roger Simon noted that reporters have given McCain "a break or two or three or four or five hundred," to which host Chris Matthews immediately replied, "Because he served in Vietnam, and a lot of us didn't." ...[Journalists] testify that his POW experience is not only the sum total of McCain's "character," but constitutes the lens through which character itself must be viewed in any race in which McCain participates.

Even so, attaining icon status took a while. He first made national headlines as a senator in the late 1980s, as part of the Keating Five, a group of senators who had lobbied in defense of a failing savings-and-loan company, owned by Charles Keating, that was under investigation during the S&L scandals. Keating had made large campaign contributions, including $112,000 to McCain, as well as paid for trips to his Bahamas house. But McCain was less involved with Keating than some of the other senators, and he got only a minor rebuke from the Senate Ethics Committee, which said his conduct was "questionable."

McCain seems to have learned two lessons from the episode. First, he decided that campaign finance reform was an important issue to pursue (partly on the merits, partly to repair his reputation). Second, as Welch notes, he learned "the practical benefits of media over-exposure":

By answering hostile questioning for nearly two full hours, until the reporters had exhausted their lines of inquiry, McCain found himself praised by his hometown paper for manfully owning up to his misdeeds. By making himself available to almost any reporter at any hour, he found that he had sown some useful empathy.

So the courtship started there. And McCain's new openness with the press may have extended beyond merely "owning up to his misdeeds." Brock and Waldman, citing a 2000 Boston Globe article, say "there is considerable evidence that McCain's office was the source of leaks...that...undermined three of the four other senators." One of the alleged leaks was of a memo that made the role of another Keating senator, Dennis DeConcini of Arizona, seem more incriminating than had been known. Another leak, of a Senate ethics panel report recommending that McCain be dropped as a target of inquiry, led to a New York Times article the very next day. McCain denied under oath in 1992 that he was responsible for any leaks, but according to Brock and Waldman, the man who led a probe of the leaks for the General Accounting Office has said he thinks McCain was responsible, as do DeConcini and former GOP senator Warren Rudman.

McCain's post-Keating efforts on campaign finance attached him to a good-government issue that liberal editorial boards love. It also separated him from most of his fellow Republicans. This is when the words "McCain" and "maverick" started appearing together regularly - also with regard to his effort during the same period to raise the federal tobacco tax. It all culminated in his first presidential run in 2000, when journalists were astounded to be invited into his inner sanctum and made privy to his unfiltered thoughts. Brock and Waldman cite a column by the conservative writer Andrew Ferguson describing the seduction process:

Here's what happens. The reporter - call him Joe - hops aboard McCain's old campaign bus, the Straight Talk Express. He knows the Arizona senator's well-known charms. He will not be seduced.

Chatting amiably, Joe asks about a Republican colleague. With ironic solemnity, McCain responds by describing his fellow senator with an anatomical epithet. Against his better judgment, Joe chuckles. (Never heard that from a presidential candidate before!)

He asks a probing question about McCain's personal life - and the senator answers without hesitation, never asking to go off the record. (Is there nothing this guy won't be candid about?)

Joe's detachment is already crumbling when McCain offhandedly mentions a self-deprecating anecdote from his time "in prison." The reporter knows the reference is to McCain's years as a POW in Vietnam, back when Joe was sucking bong hits at Princeton. (Guilt, guilt, guilt...)

McCain asks Joe about his kids, by name, then recommends a new book he's been reading - something unexpectedly literary (I.B. Singer's short stories?). Seamlessly, he mentions an article Joe wrote - not last week, but in 1993!

The reporter has never voted for a Republican in his life. But he's a goner.

The vicious campaign that George W. Bush ran against McCain in South Carolina, finally forcing him out of the race after McCain had won seven primaries, only made him an even more sympathetic figure. He emerged from the race the closest thing American politics has had to a hero, even to many liberals, since possibly Bobby Kennedy.

In the Bush years, the halo got brighter. He was of course much sought after by television after September 11. His imprimatur was crucial to Bush's "war on terror." And he still continued to go his own way here and there. Campaign finance reform finally passed in 2002, over the howling objections of conservatives, who continued to loathe McCain because of his various apostasies and on the simple grounds that if that many liberals and journalists liked him, something had to be wrong. He considered, for a few fleeting moments, John Kerry's 2004 offer to be his running mate. The love affair with the press only intensified.

Those few who bothered to try to lift the curtain noticed, especially as the Bush years progressed and he began to prepare for 2008, that there were aspects to McCain's personality and career that didn't quite fit the myth. There are three main ones.

First of all, we have the matter of his famous temper. This has received press attention from time to time. But it hasn't really hurt him, because it's so easy to spin "violent temper" into "passionate beliefs" and make it sound positive. In fact it's not too much to say that a trait that might have mortally wounded other politicians has been described as a strength: "The flip side of 'temper' is feistiness," The Economist explained in a typical assessment from 2007.

Brock and Waldman, Welch, and Cliff Schecter each write at length on McCain's anger, cataloguing instances of him popping off at fellow senators and others and holding grudges for long periods of time, and then denying flatly in on-the-record quotes that he ever loses his temper or holds a grudge. Schecter, a freelance liberal commentator who contributes frequently to The Huffington Post, recounts, for the first time, a tale - confirmed to him, he writes, by three Arizona reporters - that in 1992, after Cindy McCain teased her husband about his thinning hair, McCain snapped at her, in front of the reporters and two staffers: "At least I don't plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you c - ." One wonders if on such occasions she reminds her husband who it was that made his political career possible. She has recently called the idea that her husband has a temper "a concoction."

The second issue is more substantive and deals with McCain's policy record - both his votes as a senator and the positions he's taking as presidential candidate. In many matters, it is far from consistent. Schecter's The Real McCain chronicles, in fine-grain detail, McCain's votes and positions, showing that they often seem to reflect hypocrisy, flip-flopping, and pure expediency, rather than the political courage for which he is famous.

In a telling example, McCain has backed off the very issue that first won him such goodwill. For a while after the passage of the McCain-Feingold bill, McCain stuck with the issue, supporting reform of the so-called 527 groups that can spend large sums for advertisements attacking an opposition candidate and not exceed the limits on contributions (the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth were one such). But by July 2006, his old allies on campaign finance - Democratic Senator Russ Feingold, Republican Congressman Chris Shays, and Democratic Congressman Marty Meehan - introduced a bill to shore up the public financing of presidential campaigns. McCain had put his name on essentially the same piece of legislation in 2003. Three years later, it was absent.

Earlier this year, McCain unilaterally informed - by law, he was supposed to ask - the Federal Election Commission that he would not abide by primary spending limits he had previously accepted. He faces potentially severe financial penalties for doing so, although the FEC has become deeply politicized and hamstrung. In any event, McCain doesn't talk much about campaign finance reform today, instead concentrating his rhetoric about reform on the far more conservative-friendly topic of cutting government spending and pork.

Such instances are numerous. He voted against the Bush tax cuts originally; he now supports extending them. On immigration reform - another issue on which his views were welcome in the press and among liberals - he has stopped talking about "comprehensive" reform that would include a path to citizenship for undocumented aliens, and begun emphasizing the border fence. In 1999, he said, "I would not support the repeal of Roe v. Wade, which would then force X number of women in America to [undergo] illegal and dangerous operations." By 2006, he said its repeal "wouldn't bother me any." And last month, McCain's campaign indicated that he would no longer continue his long-held support for adding rape-and-incest exceptions to the GOP platform plank that opposes abortion. This is as extreme a position on abortion as exists in American electoral politics.

Most strikingly of all, the man who was repeatedly tortured by the Vietnamese has backpedaled even on the issue of torture by American officials. In 2005, he inserted language into the Detainee Treatment Act that Bush disliked because it forbade the military to use some methods of interrogation. The next year, after the Supreme Court had rebuked the Bush administration positions on detention in its Hamdan v. Rumsfeld decision, McCain fought the administration for long enough to receive favorable attention in the press. But he finally declared - in a much-discussed "compromise" with the administration - that he was satisfied with the infamous Military Commissions Act, which contained provisions that prevented prisoners from challenging the basis of their detention. The bill gave the White House the power to ignore the Geneva Conventions if it wished to.

The record, then, shows five serious shifts of position - four of them on some of the most contentious issues before the country, and one, on campaign finance reform, which was once the accomplishment most closely identified with him. Surely any other politician with this record would have been called a "flip-flopper" (he does appear to have remained consistent on global warming, whose existence he acknowledges and which he says he would address). The book by Brock and Waldman provides much critical insight into the important question of how the press failed to deal with McCain's actions.[3] They note that not only were no accusations of inconsistency made, but by and large the press shielded McCain from any such charges after the Military Commissions Act passed:

Yet in the week or so between the announcement of the "compromise" and the more thorough analyses of the final product, McCain seemed to disappear from the story. Though he had received reams of praise while the negotiations were going on, once the bill's details were revealed, hardly anyone in the news media held McCain accountable for his role in its creation.

There is a final matter about McCain, the new and reinvented McCain, that the press hasn't quite taken in. The McCain of 1999 and 2000 was running a campaign that was also a movement. His most famous quote from those days, which he used repeatedly, invoked the idea of public service and usually went something like this, from a commencement speech at Boston College in 2006:

Those who claim their liberty but not their duty to the civilization that ensures it, live a half-life, having indulged their self-interest at the cost of their self-respect. But sacrifice for a cause greater than your self-interest, and you invest your lives with the eminence of that cause, your self-respect assured.

This belief was at the core of his earlier campaign. Welch, an editorial-page editor at the Los Angeles Times of libertarian bent and a former editor at Reason magazine, devotes considerable space to exploring this aspect of McCain's professed values. His book is the best of the three. The other two, though useful, would have little rationale if McCain weren't a presidential candidate; but Welch has produced a thorough critique that digs deep into McCain's belief system and will have a shelf life beyond this election cycle.

As a libertarian, Welch finds the above quotation about "sacrifice" monstrous, a prettily packaged recipe for putting the people before the individual and trampling liberty. But it was something that I think many journalists and liberals and especially young people found appealing. David Foster Wallace certainly loved it, and he points out in his essay that the idea was part-and-parcel of the whole McCain package - the straight talk and the POW years conferred upon McCain a legitimacy to demand sacrifice of citizens, and his credentials made the call real and not "just one more piece of the carefully scripted bullshit that presidential candidates hand us as they go about the self-interested business of trying to become" president.

McCain's Web site features a section called "A Cause Greater," with links to volunteer organizations and such, and he still uses the phrase at times. But he's certainly cooled down the inspirational rhetoric aimed particularly at young people (I was struck reading both Welch and Wallace at how much of what they said about the vintage 2000 McCain has been said this time around about Obama). McCain's favorite literary character is Hemingway's romantic adventurer Robert Jordan from For Whom the Bell Tolls. His film hero is Brando's Emiliano Zapata, who walked out into the village plaza alone to meet certain death. McCain says he believes in the "beautiful fatalism" of noble lost causes, and he confounded reporters in 2000 by exhibiting apprehension after his New Hampshire win and relief after his South Carolina defeat. Such responses captivated many people. That McCain is probably still in there somewhere, if you dig deep enough. But the McCain we see publicly now is determined to do anything he has to do to win.

It's probably unlikely that the larger national press will arrive at this interpretation by November. The image of the straight-talking maverick who bled in a cell while Baby Boomers indulged themselves is just too hard-wired into their systems. In addition, McCain, still adept at the seduction of journalists and the self-deprecating witticism, hides his rank ambition better than, say, Hillary Clinton does.

Nevertheless, he has equally evident weaknesses. He is saddled with an unpopular incumbent whom he will nevertheless have to embrace because he'll need every vote he can squeeze out of the 29 percent who still like Bush. The recent Republican losses in special House elections in strong GOP districts in Illinois and Louisiana suggest a badly damaged brand, and McCain has not so far proven himself the kind of leader who can fundamentally redefine his party. Finally, his age might matter. If elected, he will turn seventy-three seven months into his first term. A senior moment or two - further confusing Sunni and Shia, which he's done twice now - would come in handy for his opponent.

But for the most part, the Democrats will have to defeat McCain on substance. They will begin with Iraq. McCain was much criticized for a previous statement that a hundred-year US presence in the country would "be fine with me"; so in a May 15 speech he bowed to political reality. He said that "among the conditions I intend to achieve" would be victory in Iraq, and withdrawal of "most of the service men and women," by 2013. But he presented no analytic vision of how he would accomplish that, and trying to distance himself from Bush's war policy after all this time may anger the neocons in his base more than it placates moderate voters.

His rhetoric about Iran - which inevitably will be a factor in any solution - has been belligerent. He calls it a "rogue state" and has spoken often of "rogue-state rollback," deliberately invoking a word favored by the hardest-line cold warriors; he recently said he never meant by the phrase "that we should go around and declare war." On the Middle East, he said in late April that "people should understand that I will be Hamas's worst nightmare."

On health care, McCain's plan is built around tax credits ($5,000 for families) that would cover less than half the cost of today's average family plan and lead to high deductibles and much greater risk. His economic policies would, if enacted, combine Bush's tax cuts with far more severe spending cuts in a way that could ultimately destabilize Social Security and Medicare, a goal fiscal conservatives have sought for decades; and he recently announced that he would nominate Supreme Court judges like John Roberts and Samuel Alito. So there's plenty for the opposition to work with. Whether these matters will carry more weight than lapel pins or pastors or the ghosts of Hanoi may well be the question of this year's campaign.

- May 15, 2008

Notes
[1] Drew and Simon & Schuster have reissued Citizen McCain this year with an excellent new introduction by the author that raises all the pertinent questions about McCain today and is well worth reading.

[2] Wallace covered the Straight-Talk Express for Rolling Stone in 2000. His extended essay, "Up, Simba," appears in his Consider the Lobster and Other Essays (Little, Brown, 2005). "Up, Simba" is being reissued this month as a book, with an introduction by Slate editor Jacob Weisberg, under the title McCain's Promise: Aboard the Straight-Talk Express with John McCain and a Whole Bunch of Actual Reporters, Thinking about Hope (Back Bay). This new edition was not yet available at press time.

[3] Since their book's recent publication, Brock and Waldman have added a new chapter on press coverage of McCain, which is available at mediamattersaction.org/freeride/addendum.

Michael Tomasky is Editor of Guardian America, The Guardian's American Web sitehttp://www.truthout.org/article/test-footnotes-for-who-is-john-mccain

[Saundra Hummer]

.
+++Internet Attacked
as
Tool of Terror
By
Matt Renner, t r u t h o u t | Report
Friday 30 May 2008
SUNDAY 1 JUNE 2008
Truthout Original(Artwork: For Sunday Midday)
A controversial plan to study and profile domestic terrorism was scrapped after popular push back, however, the spirit of the legislation lives on in Senator Joe Lieberman's office.
HR 1955, "The Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007" passed the House in October 2007 with almost unanimous support. The bill immediately came under fire from civil liberties watchdogs because of what many saw as a deliberate targeting of Muslims and Arabs and the possible chilling effect it might have on free speech.

The original bill intended to set up a government commission to investigate the supposed threat of domestically produced terrorists and the ideologies that underpin their radicalization. The ten-member commission was to be empowered to "hold hearings and sit and act at such times and places, take such testimony, receive such evidence, and administer such oaths as the Commission considers advisable to carry out its duties." The bill also singled out the Internet as a vehicle for terrorists to spread their ideology with the intention of recruiting and training new terrorists.

After significant public pressure, the bill stalled in the Senate. However, Senator Joe Lieberman (D-Connecticut), the current chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, has embraced the thrust of the legislation and has been working to push forward some of the goals of the original bill, including an attempt to weed out terrorist propaganda from the Internet.

Jim Dempsey, vice president for public policy at the non-profit Center for Democracy and Technology has spoken out against the assault on Internet speech. "I have more concern about what Senator Lieberman is doing than about HR 1955. [Lieberman] is no friend of civil liberties," Dempsey told Truthout, adding "there is concern that what he has planned will be worse than HR 1955."

Dempsey spoke out in favor of the spirit of HR 1955, calling the outpouring of criticism "hypothetical and hyperbolic." In his view, the study of radicalization and home grown ideologically based violence is worthwhile. However, he objects to recent actions taken by Lieberman.

On May 19, Lieberman sent a letter to Google Inc.'s CEO Eric Schmidt demanding that Google "immediately remove content produced by Islamist terrorist organizations from YouTube."

"By taking action to curtail the use of YouTube to disseminate the goals and methods of those who wish to kill innocent civilians, Google will make a singularly important contribution to this important national effort," Lieberman wrote.

Google fired back, refusing to take off material that did not violate its community guidelines. "While we respect and understand his views, YouTube encourages free speech and defends everyone's right to express unpopular points of view," Schmidt said in response, adding, "we believe that YouTube is a richer and more relevant platform for users precisely because it hosts a diverse range of views, and rather than stifle debate, we allow our users to view all acceptable content and make up their own minds."

Google removed some of the videos that violated their rules against posting violence and hate speech, but made a point to write, "most of the videos, which did not contain violent or hate speech content, were not removed because they do not violate our Community Guidelines."

"I think that Senator Lieberman's actions vis-a-vis Google were improper," Dempsey said. "A blame the messenger approach doesn't make sense as a response to radical violence. The notion that taking the videos off of YouTube will accomplish anything shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the Internet. Take the videos off of YouTube and they'll appear elsewhere."


Senator Lieberman's staff failed to return calls for comment. A New York Times editorial called Lieberman's claims about the Internet "ludicrous," and warned of an attempt to censor the Internet. Lieberman defended himself in a response letter, saying, "the peril here is not to legitimate dissent but to our fundamental right of self-defense."

According to civil liberties activists, Chairman Lieberman has been spearheading an effort to censor speech on the Internet. His committee recently released a report titled "Violent Islamist Extremism, The Internet, And The Home Grown Terrorism Threat," (PDF) a report detailing the use of web sites and Internet tools to spread pro-terrorism propaganda.

The report repeatedly blames Internet web sites and chat rooms for "radicalization," calling the web sites "portals" through which potential terrorists can "participate in the global violent Islamist movement and recruit others to their cause." As civil liberties groups have pointed out, the report focuses solely on terrorism seen as associated with Islam.

Also, the report relies heavily on experts from inside the US national security apparatus, with only one research study cited. The study by the New York Police Department details a hypothetical four step "radicalization process". The report was criticized by a coalition of civil liberties groups as "statistically and methodologically flawed," in a letter they wrote in response to the report.

Caroline Fredrickson, director of the ACLU Washington, DC, legislative office, said that Lieberman "is trying to decide what he thinks should go on the Internet," which, she said, "reeks of an interest in censoring all sorts of different dialogs."

"If someone criticizes Israel's treatment of Palestinians and favors Hamas, should that be censored?" Fredrickson asked.

Matt Renner is an editor and Washington reporter for Truthout.

Comments
Lieberman's project of using
Sat, 05/31/2008 - 14:50 — Anonymous (not verified)
Lieberman's project of using censorship to prevent bad ideologies from forming or spreading could not be more diametrically opposed to our core constitutional freedoms. Every day it becomes more evident that there is a silver lining in the dark cloud hanging over the 2000 presidential elections: thank God Joe Lieberman did not become vice president.
Apparently you missed this
Sat, 05/31/2008 - 14:46 — MelindaS (not verified) Apparently you missed this story... http://www.homelandstupidity.us/2007/01/04/the-president-wants-to-open-your-mail/ Last month President Bush, in one of his infamous signing statements, claimed the authority to open Americans’ mail without a warrant to collect foreign intelligence or in “exigent circumstances.” PGOBrien wrote: The US Mail was a useful tool for recruiting, before the Internet. So is free association and the right to gather together to discuss and share our ideas. Should we allow our mail to be opened, and should we put cameras in our homes now, so no one can call a secret meeting and recruit people to Radical Islamic Fascism (which seems to be the only terrorism we're concerned about these days -- we are incredibly silly, sometimes).
"If someone criticizes Sat, 05/31/2008 - 06:44 — A Concerned Citizen (not verified)"If someone criticizes Israel's treatment of Palestinians and favors Hamas, should that be censored?" Fredrickson asked. I'd give even odds that that is specifically the variety of content that concerns Lieberman. Speculation aside, though, Lieberman's Senate site just put up a very interesting snippit: http://lieberman.senate.gov/newsroom/release.cfm?id=298093 "No matter what their content, videos produced by terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda, that are committed to attacking America and killing Americans, should not be tolerated." This specifically states that Lieberman doesn't care what the content is, but that he's interested a total shutout of any speech whatsoever from specific groups that the administration deems unacceptable. We have never, ever, ever approached this kind of level of censorship, short of perhaps the promptly-deemed-unconstitutional Alien and Sedition Acts. Even during the McCarthy era, we didn't simply utterly silence any ideas or communication from communist groups. Personally, I feel that this sort of policy is more than a little alarming.
Yeah, Liebermans all about Sat, 05/31/2008 - 01:40 — Anonymous (not verified)Yeah, Liebermans all about preventing violence and terrorism. Thats why hes unfailingly and enthusiastically supported the mass murder of innocent Iraqi civilians by the US, and genocide and terrorism against Lebanon and the Palestian terroritories by Israel. In an honest objective ranking of the worlds worst and most dangerous terrorists, Lieberman is probably in the top 20 up there with Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Blair, Sharon, Bin Laden, Nasrallah and Olmert.
I think people are taking
Fri, 05/30/2008 - 23:50 — John thomas (not verified) I think people are taking this terrorist nonsense WAY to seriously. JT http://www.Ultimate-Anonymity.com
Lieberman received two
Fri, 05/30/2008 - 20:54 — Anthony (not verified)Lieberman received two deferments, one to attend college and law school at Yale, the second because he was married with a young child by the time he finished school in 1967. The deferments ensured that Lieberman would live --so he could vote to send younger men off to those other wars that he later supported. In the ONE conflict which he could have been sent to....Viet Nam....Lieberman was against that war. Lieberman has lived his 15 mintues of fame well beyond any reasonable limit because of the mathematics of the voting in the U.S. Senate. By some quirk of fate, he has played this rare position of being a swing vote and holds that over the entire Democratic Party. He considers himself the most powerful man in the universe right now because of the way Connecticut voters did in America. Lieberman is making it appear that he is currently serving in the U.S. military....he surrounds himself with big military officers all splattered with medals well earned. He defers to them at hearings like he was a private in the army. This is Joe's idea of being in the military which he didn't do when he surely had the chance. So he is in the business of being a tough talker and sending other parent's kids to conflicts he voted for. It makes him look "miliatary". How a true American hero like John McCain (though I don't agree with his well stated foreign policy views) would even let Joe Lieberman tag along with him is beyond the pale. Lieberman is a political whore of the first order. He is not worthy of carrying the luggage of a McCain or John Kerry or Al Gore.... There is no other description more apt for this person. There is no nice word to spin what this guy did to the Democratic Party in Connecticut and what he is doing to it right now nationally in the Senate. Had the DEMS had a 5 or 6 vote majority in the Senate, this little piece of work would be a man without a country. The GOP would not want to associate with this oppotunisitc loser and the DEMS would be hard at work getting rid of him. Chris Dodd is what good Connecticut Democrats are capable of producing and let's hope when given that chance , they'll do the right thing next time...AGAIN!!!!! Joe Lieberman can't sleep well at night knowing what he is and what he has done...and the disgusting photos of him show a man who is getting more deformed as the months go on. Scott McClellan finally came clean with himself and his country this week. Joe Lieberman does not have enough trace elements of personal character to ever become the hero McClellan has become.....or the existing American heroes such as Cindy Sheehan and Scott Ritter. Funny how in politics one lone guy or gal can do so much damage to the truth and to lies. Lieberman's is basking in his swing vote play toy in the U.S. Senate for the time being. He is lord god Lieberman and plays this anomaly to the hilt. In team sports, a guy like this would be singled out and hounded into oblivion. But there he is Joe....Joe playing his hand with money and support that he got from the Democratic Party over all those years......bluffing away until the day comes when his swing vote is meaningless. He is a bottle of nitro open to the air..he is gas stove that is leaking......he is a cannon ball rolling around the deck...he is the spoiled rotten kid who threatens to take the ball and leave if the other kids don't play by his rules.... He is the crazy guy in room full of people who everybody is afraid of fearing what he might do next if anybody upsets him. This is what Joe Lieberman relies on to keep his star brightly shining in the canopy of American political stars. Not ideas or inventiveness but the unspoken threat of "I can really f this up for you people if you don't do it MY way". Poor Chris Dodd....his fellow Senator from Connecticut is a fallen man in every sense of the word. A fallen man who thinks talking like a warrior somehow makes him one. Look yourself in the mirror, Joe. It is what we see out here and it ain't pretty. You have grown old and gone bad.
Free speech on the Internet Fri, 05/30/2008 - 19:25 — halflotus (not verified) Free speech on the Internet must be defended fiercely. With the public mind being increasingly dominated by corporate media propaganda, independent Internet communication may well be the last hope for citizens to reform the United States.
Lieberman is a crook. Fri, 05/30/2008 - 18:40 — Anonymous (not verified)
Lieberman is a crook. Everything he does seems to involve force or fraud. Of course he wants to dissolve the net. It exposed Israeli involvement in 911 and the inevitable COVERUPS.
I think we should put this
Fri, 05/30/2008 - 18:36 — Anonymous (not verified)
I think we should put this question directly to Lieberman: Many Americans believe the Bush regime carried out the attacks of 911. They believe congress is now complicit in covering up the crime. They believe that members of the Bush administration and members of congress should be prosecuted and punished by death for their crimes. does this fall under "legitimate dissent"?
LIE berman is not an Fri, 05/30/2008 - 18:24 — Greg Bacon (not verified)
LIE berman is not an American patriot, but a fifth columnist serving his masters in Tel Aviv. If Joe Boy gets his "Thought Crime Act" pushed into law, look for widespread censorship of the Internet, with the excuse being to "protect the children" from the bad guys. You're not against protecting children, are you? LIE berman needs to pack his bags and return to his beloved Israel and stay. We have no need of his ilk in the US.
If you want to give the FBI
Fri, 05/30/2008 - 18:13 — Anonymous (not verified)
If you want to give the FBI and the NSA the power to eavesdrop on Americans without a warrant, why interfere with open communication on the internet? I would think these agencies would have an easier time finding threats to national security if those threats publicly identify themselves. Is Lieberman after results or political intimidation?
i'm inclined to agree with
Fri, 05/30/2008 - 18:01 — cindi burkey (not verified)
i'm inclined to agree with the people who want to preserve the internet in a way that gives power to each individual to speak and demonstrate, and hear. other media --ways of getting information-- is very much controlled by money interests--- and is not accessible to everyone; in fact the more it is controlled by powerful interests, the more it concentrates their power. having search engines to find answers to questions has changed so much for us---where before you had to hoof it to the library or spend days and nights investigating on foot or phone just to even find the different sides of a story, now you can type your question into a box and get lots and lots of answers, each calibrated in different ways----this is so precious so worth every effort to preserve and every caution along the way. CB
I doubt that Lieberman, et
Fri, 05/30/2008 - 17:10 — Eric Rogers (not verified)
I doubt that Lieberman, et al, will be satisfied until they have all the power and we have no rights at all.
Of course the Internet can
Fri, 05/30/2008 - 16:26 — PGOBrien (not verified)
Of course the Internet can be used to recruit people to an ideological cause. It can also be used to refute an ideological cause. That's what "free speech" is all about. Other than promoting a crime (which is prohibited), you get to say things that others object to, and they get to say things back. And most of us get to listen and ponder and make up our minds. The US Mail was a useful tool for recruiting, before the Internet. So is free association and the right to gather together to discuss and share our ideas. Should we allow our mail to be opened, and should we put cameras in our homes now, so no one can call a secret meeting and recruit people to Radical Islamic Fascism (which seems to be the only terrorism we're concerned about these days -- we are incredibly silly, sometimes). If Lieberman is successful in censoring the Internet, he will be part of an establishment that will then have all the power to decide what we get to hear and read. What he will have accomplished will have little to do with fighting terrorism and so much more to do with establishing a system that looks far too much like the rule of the pigs in Animal Farm.
Given what Lieberman has
Fri, 05/30/2008 - 16:23 — Anonymous (not verified)
Given what Lieberman has become, maybe it's a good thing Gore lost.
This attack on Internet
Fri, 05/30/2008 - 16:10 — Anonymous (not verified)
This attack on Internet content is nothing less than an attack on our Freedom of speech. First, the Neocons will take 'just a little bite' as an appetizer...then they will be all set to devour the whole meal...since their foot will already be in the door. Sen. Lieberman is a well-placed tool for the ultimate purpose of taking away the very essence of what makes America..America. It is a form of ' waging war by deception.' Wake up , people, and put a stop to this lie that they are protecting our freedom, while they are taking it away with a Lie, bite by bite. Lie-berman is well- named. First he is on one side ..then he is on another. I call him a wolf in sheep's clothing . Now he has shown his true colors for all to see.
The great danger here was
Fri, 05/30/2008 - 15:46 — Anonymous (not verified)
The great danger here was suggested by testimony before the Committee on HR1955 by a staff member of the Simon Wiesenthal Center who specifically identified the 911truth movement as an example of a domestic terrorist organization using the internet to foment terrorism. This is also a move by the right-wing to suppress sharing of information and evidence concerning the "official" explanation of 911 and who is actually responsible for it.
The scary thing is that
Fri, 05/30/2008 - 15:43 — Ceana (not verified)
The scary thing is that Lieberman, who is now called McCAin's attack dog (but he actually looks more like that cartoon dog with the saggy jowls, Droopy) was the VP candidate in 2000. How did this aHole become chairman of anything? Can't Reid replace him?
This Sen.Lieberman is a tool
Fri, 05/30/2008 - 15:39 — Anonymous (not verified)
This Sen.Lieberman is a tool of the NeoCons and it should be obvious to any thinking person what the ultimate goal really is. It is nothing less than an attack on Free Speech. This whole so-called War on Terror was misnamed...it should be called the War of Terror originating right here in the USA.
Bush White House press Fri, 05/30/2008 - 15:35 — Anonymous (not verified)
Bush White House press releases constitute a clear and present danger to the peace and tranquility of the United States of America. Bush White House press releases flood the channels of public communication with dissimulation, disinformation, and diversion.
Since we're talking tools,
Fri, 05/30/2008 - 15:12 — Anonymous (not verified)
Since we're talking tools, Lieberman is a tool: a tool of his spiritual ego. Kind of like tweezers.
Interesting that he's not
Fri, 05/30/2008 - 14:34 — Anonymous (not verified)
Interesting that he's not going after ultra-right wing AMERICAN terrorists. Not the abortion clinic bombers, not the radical political and religious groups right here. No, it's all Islamists who are bad.
report this comment
Could SPAM be considered
Fri, 05/30/2008 - 13:54 — Anonymous (not verified)
Could SPAM be considered terrorist propaganda?? False Advertising?? Unsolicited Mail?? Predatory Lending?? FIAT MONEY of the BEAST POWER??!! The List goes on....
report this comment
When is Reid going to do
Fri, 05/30/2008 - 13:49 — Mary (not verified)
When is Reid going to do something about Lieberzeller???
report this comment
Something like a cross
Fri, 05/30/2008 - 13:27 — Anonymous (not verified)
Something like a cross between the House Unamerican Activities Commitee and the Committee of Public Safety -- Robespierre et al. And I do mean 'cross.'
report this comment

© 2008 truthoutClick on the following URL to gain access to this article and several other topical issues of the day.

http://www.truthout.org +++++++ .

[Saundra Hummer]

.
^^^^^^^I have a very good friend who inherited, (he and two cousins) a home in Century City, the town being named after Century Movie Studio which was torn down, with shopping complexes, hotels and other buildings being erected in it's place. Ferral Cats and Rats took over the area to a large extent. I mean it was unimaginal. One night I was sitting out in their patio, in their tiny back yard, not more than two or three blocks from Century City Twin Towers, and along their fence, and on the top board support, marched rat after rat, head to tail, not an inch between them. I couldn't see the end of them. I sat and watched and watched. No one believed me. Michael was saying they were probably only possums. I know possums and there's a big difference between the two species. There were families of rats, they were all sizes, one after another the just kept moving on. Where they were going to forage was probably the garbage bins all around the business area. Luckily for Mike and Diane, they didn't stop at their home. Being where they were there was lots of food courts, grocery stores, and restaurants, with food being consumed and discarded all over that area.

All I have to say, is, hold on people who live anywhere near the fire, your lovely homes are about to be invaded. It's bound to be horrific with all sorts of critters moving in, and invading you.

I told Mike and Diane that they needed to contact the authorities about the rats as they will mine their tunnels and build nests in and under the homes in that area causing structural damage, perhaps even their digging destroying foundations, that's common place with mice in Australia, their digging causing major damage, cracking plaster, or causing houses and other buildings to lose foundations.

Wonder what is happening with the rats that live in those structures, as we know they won't all be incinerated, they certainly weren't in Century City.
SRH
Hollywood Blaze: Fire Rages At Universal Studios In Los Angeles
Hundreds of firefighters are tackling a blaze which is tearing through Universal Studios in Los Angeles.
06/01/2008
Last Edited:
Sunday, 01 Jun 2008, 4:20 PM EDT
Created:
Sunday, 01 Jun 2008, 9:20 AM EDT

The fire has destroyed or severely damaged several buildings as well as the movie set theme park's King Kong exhibit.

The exhibit is a stop on the studio's tram tour where the giant ape bellows at passengers and artificial banana scent fills the area.

Fire captain Frank Reynoso said the alarm was raised just before dawn and at least one explosion had been heard.

Helicopters have been dumping large quantities of water from the skies.

The blaze started on a film lot sound stage and crews are working with the studio's own firefighters to ensure the flames do not spread to nearby brush.

Inspector Frank Garrido, of the LA County Fire Department, told Sky News: "In the Universal Studios backlot there's a total of six buildings lost and one sound stage damaged at this time.

"We can't confirm the cause of the fire at this time. I don't know if there was filming going on - it's still under investigation and will be for some time.

"We have over 300 firefighting personnel on scene with co-operating agencies from around the area."

Los Angeles County fire Inspector Daryl Jacobs said: "The facades are constructed of heavy timber and they tend to burn quite freely," he said.

Another fireman said: "There's some Hollywood history going up in smoke today and we're doing our best to minimalise the damage."

Street scenes of New York and New England have also been damaged.

Visitors to the studios, in Universal City, California, can see sets from films such as Psycho and Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds as well as television shows like Desperate Housewives and CSI: Crime Scene Investigation
^^^^^^^ .

[Saundra Hummer]

.
:: :: :: :: ::
Greetings from Guantanamo Bay
By
Staff Writers
May 06, 2008 12:00am

AMERICAN tourists looking for a cheap, sun-drenched hideaway should look no further than Cuban prison Guantanamo Bay, say US authorities.

A controversial hideaway on the island has been dubbed the "Caribbean's Newest 5-star Resort" by American officials, who are promoting it on tacky souvenirs, reports the Daily Mail.

For just $44 per night, guests can enjoy air-conditioned rooms with a kitchen, bathroom, living room and bedrooms.

While detainees lie incarcerated close to the resort, visitors can windsurf, take boat trips and go fishing for grouper, tuna, red snapper and swordfish.

The island also boasts a golf course, McDonald's, KFC, a Wal-Mart supermarket and a bowling alley.

Dubbed "Taliban Towers", the resort has caused international anger and condemnation, as shelves of specially branded mugs and cuddly toys sit yards from sweltering prisoners.

One gift shop promotes a T-shirt decorated with a guard tower and barbed wire. It reads: "The Taliban Towers at Guantanamo Bay, the Caribbean's Newest 5-star Resort."

Another praises "the proud protectors of freedom", while another displays "Greetings from paradise GTMO resort and spa fun in the Cuban sun."

There are even children's T-shirts, which read: "Someone who loves me got me this T-shirt in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba."

SICK
SRH

http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,22049,23653556-5013411,00.html ::

[Saundra Hummer]

.
:: :: ::
Greetings from Guantanamo Bay
By
Staff writers May 06, 2008 12:00am
Email article

Holiday camp ... while detainees lie incarcerated, visitors can windsurf, take boat trips and go fishing for grouper, tuna, red snapper and swordfish / Reuters AMERICAN tourists looking for a cheap, sun-drenched hideaway should look no further than Cuban prison Guantanamo Bay, say US authorities.
Have your say!
Comments are open on this article - add yours
A controversial hideaway on the island has been dubbed the "Caribbean's Newest 5-star Resort" by American officials, who are promoting it on tacky souvenirs, reports the Daily Mail.

For just $44 per night, guests can enjoy air-conditioned rooms with a kitchen, bathroom, living room and bedrooms.

While detainees lie incarcerated close to the resort, visitors can windsurf, take boat trips and go fishing for grouper, tuna, red snapper and swordfish.

The island also boasts a golf course, McDonald's, KFC, a Wal-Mart supermarket and a bowling alley.

Cell stays: Holidays behind bars

Dubbed "Taliban Towers", the resort has caused international anger and condemnation, as shelves of specially branded mugs and cuddly toys sit yards from sweltering prisoners.

One gift shop promotes a T-shirt decorated with a guard tower and barbed wire. It reads: "The Taliban Towers at Guantanamo Bay, the Caribbean's Newest 5-star Resort."

Another praises "the proud protectors of freedom", while another displays "Greetings from paradise GTMO resort and spa fun in the Cuban sun."

There are even children's T-shirts, which read: "Someone who loves me got me this T-shirt in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba."

Latest Comment:
Chris of Brisbane writes:
As tacky as that sounds, where do I sign up, they could even have theme rooms. I'm sure that they could even hold conventions there, make it a motivational centre, work hard or end up on the other side of the fence and all that.
Posted at 11:08am May 07, 2008

Mike Long of GTMO writes:
Actually, there are no "Tourists" here. You can not just hop on a plane and ome to GTMO even as a service member. And as for the resturants, the agreement does not proclude a profit. It procludes the establishment of businesses here outside the scope of a military installation and support for profit. Meaning that GEICO can not just come here and set up shop to run a business. Go to ANY MILITARY installation and you will find McDonalds or a Subway. These are additions to either MWR or the Navy Exchange which is allowed to operate on Any US MILITARY BASE. The Super Market is a Navy Exchange. Again, well within the scope of the Lease Agreement. It is not a WAL MART. This artical only serves one purpose. An attempt to outrage it's readers by questionable claims and outright untruths.
Posted at 7:14am May 07, 2008

waz of melbs writes:
This is sick. Reminds me of the Green zone shopping centre development project planned in Baghdad. Anywhere you make a buck eh.
Posted at 6:22pm May 06, 2008

Read all 5 comments
http://www.news.com.au/travel/story/0,26058,23653556-27978,00.html :: .

[Saundra Hummer]

. XXXXXXXGitmo, Cuba’s Hottest Tourist HauntMay 4 at 9:09am by Macranger Apparently good old Yankee ingenuity is alive at Gitmo.
“The sands are white, the sea laps gently and crowds of bronzed Americans laze in the Caribbean sunshine.
They have a cinema, a golf course and, naturally, a gift shop stocked with mugs, jaunty T-shirts and racks of postcards showing perfect sunsets and bright green iguanas.

Only the barbed wire decoration, a recurring motif, hints at anything wrong.

Welcome to “Taliban Towers” at Guantanamo Bay, the most ghoulishly distasteful tourist destination on the planet.

As these astonishing mementoes show, the US authorities are promoting the world’s most notorious prison camp as a cheap hideaway for American sunseekers – a revelation that has drawn international anger and condemnation.

Just yards from the shelves of specially branded mugs and cuddly toys, nearly 300 “enemy combatants” lie sweltering in a waking nightmare.

It is six years since foreign prisoners, many captured in Afghanistan, were first taken to this US-occupied corner of Cuba. Yet even now, no charges have been brought against them.”

Awwww, and they are such nice people too!

In case you haven’t been to Club Gitmo it offers:

“While the detainees lie incarcerated, visitors can windsurf, take boat trips and go fishing for grouper, tuna, red snapper and swordfish.

The United States’ 1.5million service personnel and Guantanamo’s 3,000 construction workers are eligible to visit the “resort”, which boasts a McDonald’s, KFC and a bowling alley.

They even have a Wal-Mart supermarket.

The vacation comes at a knock-down price: just $42 (£20) per night for a suite of air-conditioned rooms, including a kitchen, bathroom, living room and bedrooms.

But it is the souvenirs that have led to the greatest criticism. One T-shirt from the gift shop is decorated with a guard tower and barbed wire. It reads: “The Taliban Towers at Guantanamo Bay, the Caribbean’s Newest 5-star Resort.”

Another praises “the proud protectors of freedom”. A third displays a garish picture of an iguana and states: “Greetings from paradise GTMO resort and spa fun in the Cuban sun.”

A child-sized shirt says: “Someone who loves me got me this T-shirt in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.”

This of course is being reporting by yet another british activist hack for the Daily Mail in London. While I have to chuckle a the fact that this is great way to show terrorist that their terrorism doesn’t stop the enjoyment of our freedoms, there is much - including absolutely no evidence (outside a staged photo) that this is taking place. Moreover the writer Angela Levin is a known leftist advocate of terrorist “rights”.

This is also a flat out lie.

“There are currently 280 prisoners sweltering in cages in temperatures of up to 100F (38C). The camp, where 7,000 soldiers are stationed, was established in 2002 following the invasion of Afghanistan.

Guantanamo bay: The U.S. was accused of deliberately pushing detainees to the edge

In 2004, photographs of cowed Guantanamo prisoners in orange jump suits shocked the world.

“The majority are kept in isolation in cells that are no bigger than a toilet,” said Katznelson. “There is no sea view. Instead, if they have a window, it looks out on to a bleak corridor. The cells are lined with steel from floor to ceiling, including the toilet, sink and bed base.

“There is a popular misconception that these men have had trials and been found guilty. Nothing is further from the truth. Not one of them has.

“The tortures that the Americans use are wide-ranging and inhuman. One is to blast the cell with freezing cold air. Another is to pretend to take the prisoners to a country like Egypt where prisoners are tortured, even to the extent of taking them on a mock flight, so they can be treated in a barbaric fashion.”

Katznelson continued: “Inmates are offered three meals a day, but there are eight prisoners who have been on hunger strike for over a year asking either for a trial or to be set free.

“These men are force-fed twice a day. First they are strapped down with 16 different restrictions, including one that jerks their head back. Then a tube is fed through their nose and down into their stomach.

“The guards don’t always use lubrication and regularly use the same tube for several different prisoners without bothering to clean it.”

All of this was debunked long ago and I would remind Levin that more than twenty visits to Gitmo by Congressional delgations showed nothing of the kind. Additionally the quarters that inmates are housed in are air conditioned - have been - as the barracks where inmates are housed being renovated in 2004-2005. This isn’t recent by the way as the Red Cross cited considerable improvement in the facilities in 2006.

Moreover there are ongoing renovations which began last year to provide such atrocities as cable TV in recreational areas.

It’s a shame that the article is most likely bogus, I need a vacation this summer.

3
Responses for "Club Gitmo, Cuba’s Hottest Tourist Haunt"
crosspatch

May 4th, 2008 at 10:18 am

1
“All of this was debunked long ago”

I don’t understand why the government isn’t more aggressive in debunking stories like this. Why doesn’t the White House spokesman call the newspaper on it during the daily press briefing in a highly public way?

And why don’t the readers of the paper do so? Comment on the story or write a letter to the editor if you have the specifics to debunk the story.

DubiousD

May 4th, 2008 at 10:38 am

2
“I don’t understand why the government isn’t more aggressive in debunking stories like this.”

Because Bush is in charge. End of discussion.

Sunday Links : Stop The ACLU

May 4th, 2008 at 11:00 am

3
MacRanger talks about Club Gitmo! Jon Ham, and Michelle Malkin talks about the absurity of the screams of asparagus. Dan Collins wonders if mineral rights are far behind. Don Surber discusses Obama’s boiling point. Scared Monkeys talk about Hillary’s horse. Doug Ross discusses political correctness during times of war. Rick at Brutally Honest discovers that global warming is causing shark attacks! Macker is playing with the moonbats.http://www.macsmind.com/wordpress/2008/05/04/club-gitmo-cubas-hottest-tourist-haunt/
XXXXX .

[Saundra Hummer]

~~~~~~~~~
Rediscovery of the Caspian Horse - 1965
Louise Firouz, the American who rediscovered them, wrote in 1968: "We are still searching for them: diminutive .... Arab looking creatures with big bold eyes, prominent jaws and high-set tails which so distinguish their larger cousins. It has been a losing battle as the already pitifully small numbers are further decimated each year by famine, disease and lack of care, until now we must accept the sad fact that the survivors must number no more than 30."

Mrs. Firouz was writing of her concern that an ancient, pure breed of horse, the forerunner of most hot bloods, until then thought to be extinct, was in fact, on the very brink of extinction. Through neglect, ignorance, and the vicissitudes of the 13 centuries returned to the wild, this ancient breed's honored place in history had been almost irretrievably lost. Only at the last minute and by pure chance, were the existence, beauty, and rarity of this regal horse rediscovered.

In 1957, Louise Laylin, an American born Cornell graduate, married fellow student Narcy Firouz, an aristocrat linked to the former Shah of Iran. She returned with him to his native country of Iran. Subsequently, she and her husband established the Norouzabad Equestrian Center for children of families living in the country's capital of Tehran. One of the difficulties she faced, that of providing appropriate mounts for some of the smaller riders, proved a catalyst for her pursuit of what were rumored to be very small horses in the remote villages above the Caspian Sea. Because hot-blooded stallions were the only mounts available for Tehran's young riders, Mrs. Firouz wanted to provide smaller, more even-tempered equines. Her work would soon result in the rediscovery and preservation of an ancient breed, that she dubbed The Caspian Horse.

In 1965, with a small expedition of female companions, Louise discovered small horses in the mountainous regions south of the Caspian Sea, centered near the town of Amol. At first glance, they appeared somewhat rough from lack of nourishment, and were covered with ticks and parasites. However, upon closer inspection, these horses showed distinctive characteristics similar to the Arabian horse such as large protruding eyes, a prominent jaw, large nostrils, a dished head and a high set tail. This first trip rescued 3 horses, which were dubbed Caspians, for the vicinity in which they were found. The former owners of these often misused and over-worked horses had no idea of the breed's near extinction.

Between July 1965 and August 1968, Mrs. Firouz conducted a careful survey to determine the approximate number and range of the surviving Caspian horses. On the basis of this survey, it was estimated that there were approximately 50 small horses with definite Caspian characteristics along the entire southern coast of the Caspian Sea. The major concentration of these horses (approximately 30) occupied a 2,000 square mile triangle between Amol, Babol and Kiakola in the Elburz Mountains. The remaining 20 horses were so scattered it was impossible for the survey to consider them as completely pure.

Of the horses found, 7 mares, and 6 stallions were purchased to form the foundation stock for a breeding center established by Mrs. Firouz in Norouzabad, Iran. As a purely private venture, this first breeding center was financially difficult to maintain. In 1970, the Royal Horse Society (RHS) was formed under the patronage of the Crown Prince, HIH Prince Reza Pahlavi. The primary aim of the RHS was to preserve and improve Iran's native breeds. The RHS purchased the foundation Caspians, by then numbering 23, but allowed them to be maintained in Norouzabad until 1974, at which time the RHS took over complete management of the herd.

Surviving War and Revolution
Due to the pressing military situation caused by the Iran-Iraq War, and her interest in keeping the breed alive, between 1971 and 1976, Mrs. Firouz exported 9 stallions and 17 mares representing 19 different Caspian bloodlines from Iran to Europe. These 26 horses constitute the European Foundation Herd. This wise decision ensured the survival of the Caspian horse outside of Iran.

Because of her efforts to save the Caspian horses from starvation and slaughter by exportation during the early years of the Islamic Revolution in 1979, Narcy and Louise Firouz were arrested and detained. During this incarceration, Mrs. Firouz was imprisoned while suffering from a broken left ankle, she went on a hunger strike in protest which was successful, but she left prison weak and emaciated.

With Iran's many recent political upheavals, the overthrow of the Shah, the Islamic Revolution, bombing during the protracted Iran-Iraq War and the ever-present threat of famine, together with the Caspian's close association with royalty, the Caspian's survival there remains precarious. Louise Firouz' discovery was ever in the balance between political honoraria as a national treasure, and the threat of political seizure as wartime food. After Mrs. Firouz' breeding successes in the 1960's and early '70's, the Iran-Iraq War placed a heavy burden on her endeavors. The Royal Horse Society of Iran completely took over the Norouzbad herd in 1974. A second private herd was started in 1975, consisting of 20 mares and 3 stallions from feral stock found along the Caspian coast. The breeding center was established by Mrs. Firouz; this time, in northeastern Iran at Gara Tepe Sheikh.

In 1977, this second private breeding center was ordered to close its doors as the RHS declared a ban on all Caspian exports. The RHS collected all Caspians remaining in Iran to breed selectively in a "national stud" to conform to a specific standard of the breed. Forced by the government to surrender all but one Caspian horse, Mrs. Firouz' founding stock was effectively wiped out. Due to the complex political climate, most of the RHS horses were lost, primarily through auction sales of the nationalized horses to Turkoman and Kazakh tribes who used the purchases as pack animals and for meat!

After the war was over, Mrs. Firouz once again completely redeveloped a third breeding center to save the Caspian from extinction in Iran. The 1992 International Caspian Stud Book listed 38 registered Iranian Caspians. Mrs. Firouz obtained most of these horses through either expeditions to the Caspian seacoast to capture more feral horses; purchases from Revolutionary Guards repatriating stolen or seized horses after the Iran-Iraq War, or through breeding.

Undaunted, by political pressure, Mrs. Firouz was able to ship 3 stallions and 4 mares to Europe via the Azeri-American war zone where bandits attacked and robbed the convoy, on across Russia to Belarus, and then to the United Kingdom. These horses which left Iran in July of 1993, reached the United Kingdom in February of 1994. This shipment will sustain and enhance the gene pool and healthy breeding of the Caspian horse established in Europe and the United States.

By 1992, there were still only 112 breeding mares and 30 stallions in Europe. Fortunately, according to the studies completed by Dr. Gus Cothran, the measure of genetic variation among the world-wide Caspian horse population was near the average for U.S. domestic breeds.

Mr. Nancy Firouz passed away in May 1994. Due to estate settlement, and the financial losses Mrs. Firouz incurred in the shipment of the last 7 Caspians out of Iran into England she was unable to continue her breeding program in Iran. The remainder of Mrs. Firouz’s Caspian horses were sold to the Ministry of Jehad. The fate of the Caspian remaining in Iran was once again in jeopardy.

More recently, in 1999, aided by the visits into Iran and support of concerned individuals from Canada and the United States, Louise Firouz, at the age of 65, has started yet another Caspian breeding program on her remote farm at Gara Tepe Sheikh on the Turkoman Steppes next to the Turkmenistan border. During these recent treks in the spring of 1999, two foundation Caspian stallions and eight Caspian foundation mares were gathered to once again be rescued by Mrs. Firouz’ nurturing care. Courageously overlooking her past, seemingly overwhelming losses, she is experiencing the renewed joy of watching the newborn Caspian foals thrive under her ever watchful eye.
Louise Leland Firouz: There was an obituary on this lady this morning, posted by ABC News. There will be a segment about her on tonights ABC NEWS.
Go on-site to gain access to photo's by clicking on the following link.
http://www.caspians.com/rediscovery.htm~~~~~~~

[Saundra Hummer]

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^^^^^^^
News
New Contracts Reflect Continued Presence in Iraq
Monday 02 June 2008
By
Walter Pincus
The Washington Post
A Blackwater security contractor in Mosul, Iraq. The depth of US involvement in Iraq is illustrated by a handful of new contract proposals made public in May.
(Photo: Jacob Silberberg / AP)
Go on-site to view photo by clicking on the link at end of this article.
The depth of US involvement in Iraq and the difficulty the next president will face in pulling personnel out of the country are illustrated by a handful of new contract proposals made public in May. The contracts call for new spending, from supplying mentors to officials with Iraq's Defense and Interior ministries to establishing a U.S.-marshal-type system to protect Iraqi courts. Contractors would provide more than 100 linguists with secret clearances and deliver food to Iraqi detainees at a new, U.S.-run prison.

The proposals reflect multiyear commitments. The mentor contract notes that the U.S. military "desires for both Ministry of Interior and Ministry of Defense to become mostly self-sufficient within two years," a time outside some proposals for U.S. combat troop withdrawal. The mentors sought would "advise, train [and] assist ... particular Iraqi officials" who work in the Ministry of Defense, which runs the Iraqi army, or the Ministry of Interior, which runs the police and other security units.

The mentors will assist an U.S. military group that previously began to implement what are described as "core processes and systems," such as procurement, contracting, force development, management and budgeting, and public affairs.

Mentors would have to make a one-year commitment, with options for two one-year contracts after that. As a reminder of what they are getting into, the mentors must supply their helmets, protective body armor and gas masks, according to the announcement.

The marshals service would be organized by the State Department's bureau responsible for developing rule of law programs in Iraq. It "has plans to create an Iraqi service to be known as the Judicial Protection Service (JPS), modeled to some degree after the U.S. Marshals Service, that will ensure the safe conduct of judicial proceedings and protect judges, witnesses, court staff, and court facilities," a notice published last month said.

State's plan is to hire a contractor as a judicial security program manager, who would work out details of how such a service could be put together for the Iraqis. That person or group would develop not only the mission, size and structure of an Iraqi JPS service, but also the personnel, budgeting and training materials necessary, plus "all other aspects of creating the new organization so that the project can be contracted out."

In short, State wants a contractor to put together all the elements so the department can contract the project to another contractor.

State also is looking to hire a contractor to provide "100 plus linguists" who would work for a year each, with as many as four one-year options to follow.

Arabic and Kurdish translators are sought. "Native or near native capability in the foreign language and an excellent command of the English language are required," according to the notice. They will work not only at State's Baghdad embassy, but also at regional offices and with Provincial Reconstruction Teams.

Another contract noticed last week previews the opening, apparently in September, of a U.S.-run prison, now labeled a Theater Internment Facility Reconciliation Center, which is to be located at Camp Taji, 12 miles north of Baghdad. The new contract calls for providing food for "up to 5,000 detainees" and will also cover 150 Iraqi nationals, who apparently will work at the facility. The contract is to run for one year, with an option year to follow.

The U.S. holds about 20,000 Iraqis at two facilities today, mostly in Camp Bucca in southern Iraq and the rest at Camp Cropper near Baghdad. Along with the facility at Camp Taji, which is expected to hold Iraqis detained in Baghdad, another new reconciliation center, mainly for Sunnis, is being built at Ramadi in Anbar province, where many of these detainees were captured.

In March, Marine Maj. Gen. Douglas Stone, who runs the detainee program, told reporters that, on average. Iraqi detainees remain in a U.S. facility for 11 months.

But that might not be the case for the roughly 9,000 Iraqis whom he described as having "a very rigorous view of an ideology that we would broadly categorize as al-Qaeda." They are headed to the new reconciliation centers for what could be longer stays.

National security and intelligence reporter Walter Pincus pores over the speeches, reports, transcripts and other documents that flood Washington and every week uncovers the fine print that rarely makes headlines - but should. If you have any items that fit the bill, please send them to fineprint@washpost.com.
http://www.truthout.org/article/long-term-contracts-show-plans-continued-iraq-occupation?print ^^^^^.

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"The enemy aggressor is always pursuing a course of larceny, murder, rapine and barbarism. We are always moving forward with high mission, a destiny imposed by the Deity to regenerate our victims while incidentally capturing their markets, to civilise savage and senile and paranoid peoples while blundering accidentally into their oil wells."

John Flynn
1944
~~~
"The American system is the most ingenious system of control in world history. With a country so rich in natural resources, talent and labour power the system can afford to distribute just enough wealth to just enough people to limit discontent to a troublesome minority. It is a country so powerful, so big, so pleasing to so many of its' citizens that it can afford to give freedom of dissent to the small number who are not pleased. There is no system of control with more openings, apertures, flexibilities, rewards for the chosen.

[...] There is none that disperses its' control more complexly through the voting system, the work situation, the church, the family, the school, the mass media - none more successful in mollifying opposition with reforms, isolating people from one another, creating patriotic loyalty."

Howard Zinn
From
'A People's History of the United States
First published 1981

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How Cheney Outfoxed His Foes on Iran and EFPs
Analysis
by
Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON, Jun 2 (IPS) - For many months, the propaganda line that explosively formed projectiles (EFPs) that could penetrate U.S. armoured vehicles were coming straight from Iran has been embraced publicly by the entire George W. Bush administration. But when that argument was proposed internally by military officials in January 2007, it was attacked by key administration officials as unsupported by the facts.

Vice President Dick Cheney was able to get around those objections and get his Iranian EFP line accepted only because of arrangements he and Bush made with Gen. David Petraeus before he took command of U.S. forces in Iraq.

The initial draft of the proposed military briefing on the issue of EFPs, which asserted flatly that EFPs were being manufactured and smuggled to Iraqi Shiite groups directly by the Iranian regime, was met with unanimous objection from the State Department, Defence Department and National Security Council staff, as administration officials themselves stated publicly.

Defence Secretary Robert Gates, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley tried to push back against Cheney's proposed line because they recognised it as an effort to go well beyond the compromise policy toward Iran that had been worked out in December and early January. The compromise policy had been to focus on networks working on procuring EFPs within Iraq and not to target Iran as directly responsible.

At his regular press briefing on Jan. 24, 2007, Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs and Department spokesman Sean McCormack revealed the primary basis for the State, Defence and NSC opposition to the Cheney line on EFPs.

Asked whether the U.S. government had any evidence that EFPs were manufactured in Iran, McCormack did not answer directly but said, "You don't necessarily have to construct something in Iran in order for it to be a threat to the U.S. or British troops from the Iranian regime. There are lots of different ways you can do that. You can bring the know-how. You can train other people in Iraq to do that."

McCormack thus revealed that the State Department wasn't buying the accusation that Iran was manufacturing EFPs and sending them to the Shiite forces of Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army fighting against U.S. forces.

On Feb. 2, while briefing the news media on the new National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, Hadley asserted bluntly that the draft military briefing that had been circulated in Washington had not been based on evidence.

"The truth is, quite frankly, we thought the briefing was overstated," said Hadley. "We sent it back to get it narrowed and focused on the facts."

Hadley did not tell reporters which points in the draft briefing paper had not been based on the evidence, but the remarks by McCormack and Gates were clear indications that the briefing had made claims of Iranian manufacturing of weapons and smuggling them into Iraq that could not be supported.

Hadley further revealed that he, Gates and Rice had tried to use the imminence of a National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq to force the issue of the briefing's exaggerated claims. The briefing, he said was "an attempt to...address some of the issues in the NIE in a briefing on intelligence of Iranian activity in Iraq. And we thought, hey, why are we doing this?"

He said he and his associates wanted a briefing that "we're confident everyone can stand behind". The national security adviser was implying that the proposed briefing was not supported by the NIE on Iraq, and that the drafters would therefore have to redraft it so that the intelligence community could support it.

Hadley didn't say who he meant by "we", but Gates told reporters the same day that he and Rice had joined Hadley in ensuring that the planned briefing "is dominated by facts".

The declassified version of the NIE's main conclusions indicated that it did not support the claim that Iran was exporting EFPs to the Mahdi Army. The only sentence that related to the issue was, "Iranian lethal support for select groups of Iraqi Shia militants clearly intensifies the conflict in Iraq." But in the absence of any language alleging Iranian EFP manufacture and export to Iraq, that phrase appears to be a reference to training of Mahdi Army officers.

Hadley, Rice and Gates thus appeared to believe that the briefing would have to reflect the NIE, and that they would be able to review the revised version before it was presented to the press. On Feb. 9, State Department spokesman McCormack said, "[W]hen the working-level folks at the deputies level...produce a presentation that they are comfortable with, I am sure that they'll share it with Secretary Rice, Secretary Gates and Steve Hadley over at the NSC just for review."

But Cheney had a surprise for the opponents of his hard line on Iran. When White House spokeswoman Dana Perino was asked on Feb. 9 about when the briefing would be held, she replied, "Decisions on that are being made out in Baghdad."

That announcement came just as Gen. George W. Casey was to be replaced by Gen. Petraeus as the new commander. Petraeus had only arrived in Iraq the day before and the changeover ceremony came on Feb. 10.

The day after the ceremony, three military officers presented a briefing to the press which not only asserted that the EFPs could only have been manufactured in Iran but that Iran's Qods Force was behind the smuggling of those weapons into Iraq. They strongly suggested, moreover, that the Iranian government knew about the smuggling.

Cheney had used the compliant Petraeus to do an end-run around the national security bureaucracy. Petraeus had already reached agreement with the White House to take Cheney's line on the EFPs issue and to present the briefing immediately without consulting State or Defence.

State and Defence tried to counter this manoeuvre. McCormack argued, rather lamely, that the briefing had really been about "a threat to our troops from these devices and from the networks that supply them". And the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Peter Pace, responded by saying that he could not "from his own knowledge" confirm the assertion that the Qods Force was providing bomb-making kits to Shiite insurgents.

The U.S. command in Baghdad temporarily backed away from the briefers' charge against Iran. The command spokesman, Lt. Gen. William B. Caldwell, who had been one of the three military briefers, was forced to tell reporters on Feb. 14 that the purpose of the briefing had been to talk only about the threat to U.S. troops, implying that briefers had gone beyond their brief in making statements about Iranian complicity.

But the hardline position on EFP was the one that dominated press coverage. Instead of the more cautious line focusing on the EFP networks inside Iraq, which was what State, Defence and NSC and agreed to in January, Cheney now had a potential casus belli against Iran.

And Cheney would continue to use his alliance with Petraeus to advance his proposal for an attack on Qods Force bases in Iran. The very first episode in the Cheney-Petraeus alliance sheds additional light on the nomination of Petraeus to become the new CENTCOM commander later this year.

Gareth Porter is an historian and national security policy analyst. The paperback edition of his latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam", was published in 2006.
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~~~ ..

[Saundra Hummer]

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:: :: ::
'Iraq Troop Pullout Would Harm Israel'
By
JPOST.COM STAFF

02/06/08 " JPost" -- -- US presidential candidate, Sen. John McCain on Monday criticized Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama's calls for withdrawing US troops from Iraq, saying that such a pullout would harm Israel's security.

Speaking to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), McCain also blasted Obama's calls for talks with Iran.

"The Iranians have spent years working toward a nuclear program,'' McCain said, "and the idea that they now seek nuclear weapons because we refuse to engage in presidential-level talks is a serious misreading of history."

"Even so, we hear talk of a meeting with the Iranian leadership offered up as if it were some sudden inspiration, a bold new idea that somehow nobody has ever thought of before," he said.

"Yet it's hard to see what such a summit with President Ahmadinejad would actually gain, except an earful of anti-Semitic rants, and a worldwide audience for a man who denies one Holocaust and talks before frenzied crowds about starting another," the Arizona senator continued. "Such a spectacle would harm Iranian moderates and dissidents, as the radicals and hardliners strengthen their position and suddenly acquire the appearance of respectability."

McCain seemed to be responding to Sen. Obama's previous statements made during a debate in 2007 in which he expressed willingness to hold talks with leaders of Cuba, Iran, North Korea and Syria.
An Obama campaign spokesman, Hari Sevugan, was quick to retort. "John McCain stubbornly insists on continuing a dangerous and failed foreign policy that has clearly made the United States and Israel less secure."

"Here are the results of the policies that John McCain has supported, and would continue. During the Bush Administration, Iran has dramatically expanded its nuclear program, going from zero centrifuges to more than 3000 centrifuges,'' the Obama camp spokesman added.

"During the Bush Administration, Iran has expanded its influence throughout a vitally important region, plying Hamas and Hizbullah with money and arms. During the Bush Administration, Hamas took over Gaza. Most importantly, the war in Iraq that John McCain supported and promises to continue indefinitely has done more to dramatically strengthen and embolden Iran than anything in a generation.''

McCain also criticized Obama's calls for removing US troops from Iraq. "You would never know from listening to those who are still caught up in angry arguments over yesterday's options, but our troops in Iraq have made hard-won progress under General Petraeus' new strategy." he said.

"[Withdrawal from Iraq] would surely result in a catastrophe,'' McCain said. "If our troops are ordered to make a forced retreat, we risk all-out civil war, genocide, and a failed state in the heart of the Middle East. Al Qaida terrorists would rejoice in the defeat of the United States.

"Allowing a potential terrorist sanctuary would profoundly affect the security of the United States, Israel, and our other friends, and would invite further intervention from Iraq's neighbors, including an emboldened Iran. We must not let this happen.''

In his speech, McCain called for measures aimed at increasing pressure on Iran, such as severely limiting Iranian imports of gasoline, targeted sanctions such as denying visas and freezing assets and a worldwide campaign to divest from companies doing business with Iran.

McCain called for financial sanctions on the Central Bank of Iran, which he said aids in terrorism and weapons proliferation, and he criticized Obama for opposing a measure to designate Iran's Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization responsible for killing US troops in Iraq.

McCain has warm relations with the group, which is influential in the Jewish community. His call for sanctions against gasoline imports is a priority that AIPAC's members plan to lobby for in Congress later in the week.

In contrast, Obama has worked to reassure Jewish voters who have expressed some unease about his candidacy.

"I welcome the Muslim world's accurate perception that I am interested in opening up dialogue and interested in moving away from the unilateral policies of George Bush, but nobody should mistake that for a softer stance when it comes to terrorism or when it comes to protecting Israel's security or making sure that the alliance is strong and firm," Obama said in an interview last month with The Atlantic magazine. "You will not see, under my presidency, any slackening in commitment to Israel's security."

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[Saundra Hummer]

.* * * * *
And The Winner Is
...
The Israel lobby
By
Pepe Escobar

02/06/08 "Asia Times" -- - WASHINGTON - They're all here - and they're all ready to party. The three United States presidential candidates - John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Madam House speaker Nancy Pelosi. Most US senators and virtually half of the US Congress. Vice President Dick Cheney's wife, Lynne. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Embattled Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. And a host of Jewish and non-Jewish political and academic heavy-hitters among the 7,000 participants.

Such star power wattage, a Washington version of the Oscars, is the stock in trade of AIPAC - the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the crucial player in what is generally known as the Israel lobby and which holds its annual Policy Conference this week in Washington at which most of the heavyweights will deliver lectures.

Few books in recent years have been as explosive or controversial as The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, written by Stephen Walt from Harvard University and John Mearsheimer from the University of Chicago, published in 2007. In it, professors Walt and Mearsheimer argued the case of the Israeli lobby not as "a cabal or conspiracy that 'controls' US foreign policy", but as an extremely powerful interest group made up of Jews and non-Jews, a "loose coalition of individuals and organizations tirelessly working to move US foreign policy in Israel's direction".

Walt and Mearsheimer also made the key point that "anyone who criticizes Israeli actions or says that pro-Israel groups have significant influence over US Middle East policy stands a good chance of being labeled an anti-Semite". Anyone for that matter who "says that there is an Israeli lobby" also runs the risk of being charged with anti-Semitism.

All the candidates in the House say yeah
Republican presidential candidate McCain is opening this year's AIPAC jamboree; Clinton and Obama are closing it on Wednesday. Walt and Mearsheimer's verdict on the dangerous liaisons between presidential candidates and AIPAC remains unimpeachable: "None of the candidates is likely to criticize Israel in any significant way or suggest that the US ought to pursue a more evenhanded policy in the region. And those who do will probably fall by the wayside."

Take what Clinton said in February at an AIPAC meeting in New York: "Israel is a beacon of what's right in a neighborhood overshadowed by the wrongs of radicalism, extremism, despotism and terrorism." A year before, Clinton was in favor of sitting and talking to Iran's leadership.

And take what Obama said in March at an AIPAC meeting in Chicago; no reference at all to Palestinian "suffering", as he had done on the campaign trail in March 2007. Obama also made it clear he would do nothing to alter the US-Israeli relationship.

No wonder AIPAC is considered by most members of the US Congress as more powerful than the National Rifle Association or the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations.

AIPAC has explicit Zionist roots. The founder, "Si" Kenen, was head of the American Zionist Council in 1951. The body was reorganized as a US lobby - the American Zionist Committee for Public Affairs - in 1953-4, and then renamed AIPAC in 1959. Under Tom Dine, in the 1970s, it was turned into a mass organization with more than 150 employees and a budget of up to US$60 million today. Dine was later ousted because he was considered not hawkish enough.

The top leadership - mostly former AIPAC presidents - is always more hawkish on the Middle East than most Jewish Americans. AIPAC only dropped its opposition to a Palestinian state - without endorsing it - when Ehud Barak became Israeli prime minister in 1999.

AIPAC keeps a very close relationship with an array of influential think-tanks, like the American Enterprise Institute, the Center for Security Policy, the Hudson Institute, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, the Middle East Forum, the The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Sprinkled neo-cons in these think-tanks can be regarded as a microcosm of the larger Israel lobby - Jews and non-Jews (It's important to remember that Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, David Wurmser and five other neo-cons drafted the infamous "A Clean Break" document to Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996 - the ultimate road map for hardcore regime change all over the Middle East.)

The house that AIPAC built
AIPAC in the US Congress is a rough beast indeed. Former president Bill Clinton defined it as "stunningly effective". Former speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich called it "the most effective general-interest group across the entire planet". The New York Times as "the most important organization affecting America's relationship with Israel". Embattled Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, before his involvement in a corruption scandal, said. "Thank God we have AIPAC, the greatest supporter and friend we have in the whole world."

AIPAC maintains a virtual stranglehold over the US Congress. Critics of the Israel lobby other than Walt and Mearsheimer also contend that AIPAC essentially prevents any possibility of open debate on US policy towards Israel. Compare it with a 2004 report by the Pentagon's Defense Science Board, according to which "Muslims do not hate our freedom, but rather they hate our policies".

AIPAC should not be crossed. It rewards those who support its agenda, and punishes those who don't. In the end, it's all about money - specifically campaign contributions. From 2000 to 2004, according to the Washington Post, AIPAC honchos contributed an average of $72,000 each to campaigns and political committees. For pro-AIPAC politicians, money simply pours from all over the US.

Every member of the US Congress receives AIPAC's bi-weekly newsletter, the Near East Report. Walt and Mearsheimer stress that Congressmen and their staff "usually turn to AIPAC when they need info; AIPAC is called upon to draft speeches, work on legislation, advise on tactics, research, collect co-sponsors and marshal votes".

Hillary Clinton has learned long ago she should not cross AIPAC. Clinton used to support a Palestinian state in 1998. She even embraced Suha Arafat, Yasser's wife, in 1999. After much scolding, she suddenly became a vigorous defender of Israel, and years later wholeheartedly supported the 2006 Israeli war against Hezbollah in Lebanon. Clinton may have gotten the bulk of Jewish American donations for her 2008 presidential campaign.

Rice also learned about facts on the ground. She tried to restart the eternally moribund "peace process" when visiting the Middle East in March 2007. Before the trip, she got an AIPAC letter signed by no less than 79 US senators telling her not to talk to the new Palestinian unity government until it "recognized Israel, renounced terror and agreed to abide by Palestinian-Israeli agreements".

AIPAC and Iraq
It has become relatively fashionable for some members of the Israeli lobby to deny any involvement in the build-up towards the war on Iraq. But few remember what AIPAC executive director Howard Kohr told the New York Sun in January 2003: "Quietly lobbying Congress to approve the use of force in Iraq was one of AIPAC's successes over the past year."

And in a New Yorker profile of Steven Rosen, AIPAC's policy director during the run-up to the war on Iraqi, it was stated that "AIPAC lobbied Congress in favor of the Iraqi war".

Compare it with a 2007 Gallup study based on 13 different polls, according to which 77% of American Jews were opposed to the Iraq war, compared to 52% of Americans.

Walt and Mearsheimer contend "the war was due in large part to the lobby's influence, and especially its neo-con wing. The lobby is not always representative of the larger community for which it often claims to speak."

AIPAC and Iran
Now it is Iran time. Walt and Mearsheimer contend "the lobby is fighting to prevent the US from reversing course and seeking a rapprochement with Tehran. They continue to promote an increasingly confrontational and counterproductive policy instead". Not much different from the embattled Olmert, who told Germany's Focus magazine in April 2007 that "it would take 10 days ... and 1,000 Tomahawk cruise missiles" to set back Iran's nuclear program.

A measure of Walt and Mearsheimer's power to rattle reputations is that the Zionist establishment had to bring out all its big guns to refute their argument, again and again.

Walt and Mearsheimer are no ideologues. They are realpolitik practitioners - very much at ease in the top circles of US foreign policy establishment. Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of their book is that they argued four points that the establishment never mentions in public. Essentially these are:

The US has already won its major wars in the Middle East, against Arab secular nationalism and against communism, and does not need Israel quite as much.

Israel is now so much more powerful than all Arab nations combined that it can take care of itself.

The unconditional support for Israel, regardless of its outrageous deeds, does harm US interests, destabilizes pro-US regimes like Hosi Mubarak's Egypt and King Abdullah's Jordan, and plays into the hands of Salafi-jihadi radicals.

Fighting Israel's wars on its behalf is the surefire way to lead to the collapse of US power in the Middle East.

Walt and Mearsheimer also seem not to accept that oil, and rivalry with Russia and China, have also played a crucial part in why the US went to war in Iraq and may attack Iran in the near future. Anyway only insiders as themselves - with unassailable establishment credentials - could have started, at the highest levels of public debate, a serious discussion of extreme pro-Zionism in the public and political life of the US.

Meanwhile, the power of the lobby seems unassailable. In March 2007, the US Congress was trying to attach a provision to a Pentagon spending bill that would have required President George W Bush to get congressional approval before attacking Iran. AIPAC was strongly against it - because it viewed the legislation as taking the military option "off the table". The provision was killed. Congressman Dennis Kucinich said this was due to AIPAC.

AIPAC made a lot of waves in 2002, when the theme of the annual meeting was "America and Israel standing against terror". Everyone bashed Arafat, Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, the Taliban, Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran and Syria at the same time - just as in PNAC's letter to Bush in April 2002 claiming that Israel was also fighting an "axis of evil" alongside the US.

During AIPAC's jamboree in 2004, Bush received 23 standing ovations defending his Iraq policy. Last year, the star was Cheney, making the case for the troop "surge" in Iraq. Pelosi was dutifully present. But it was pastor John Hagee, whose endorsement McCain recently refused, who really made a killing - even though Hagee maintains that "anti-Semitism is the result of the Jews' rebellion against God".

On Iran, Hagee definitely set the tone: "It is 1938; Iran is Germany and [President Mahmud] Ahmadinejad is the new [Adolf] Hitler. We must stop Iran's nuclear threat and stand boldly with Israel." He received multiple standing ovations. McCain may be sure to get the same treatment this year - and he'll certainly have no trouble remaining on message.

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.

Copyright 2008 Asia Times Online Ltd
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info
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[Saundra Hummer]

.$$$$$$$$$Indefensible Spending
By Robert Scheer
02/06/08 ---- This Op-Ed was originally published in The Los Angeles Times.
What should be the most important issue in this election is one that is rarely, if ever, addressed: Why is U.S. military spending at the highest point, in inflation-adjusted dollars, than at any time since the end of World War II? Why, without a sophisticated military opponent in sight, is the United States spending trillions of dollars on the development of high-tech weapons systems that lost their purpose with the collapse of the Soviet Union two decades ago?

You wouldn’t know it from the most-exhausting-ever presidential primary campaigns, but the 2009 defense budget commits the United States to spending more (again, in real dollars) to defeat a ragtag band of terrorists than it spent at the height of the Cold War fighting the Soviet superpower and what we alleged were its surrogates in the Korean and Vietnam wars.

The Pentagon’s budget for fiscal year 2008 set a post-World War II record at $625 billion, and that does not include more than $100 billion in other federal budget expenditures for homeland security, nuclear weapons and so-called black budget—or covert—operations.

And what are we spending all this money on? We are talking high-tech war toys designed to fight a Cold War enemy that no longer exists, including the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program, with its estimated total price tag of $300 billion, and Virginia-class submarines at $2.5 billion each. Who cares that the terrorists lack submarines for the Navy to battle deep in the ocean, for which the Virginia-class submarine was designed?

Then there are the F-22 Raptor jet fighters that no longer fill a credible military purpose but will take $65 billion out of taxpayers’ pockets. The Raptor includes stealth technology and elaborate electronics designed to counter threatened leaps in Soviet war-fighting capability. In 2005, Lawrence J. Korb, an assistant secretary of Defense in the Reagan administration, wrote that the Raptor “is the most unnecessary weapon system being built by the Pentagon.”

Since President Bush’s first year in office, according to the Government Accountability Office, the Defense Department has doubled its future planned investment in those ultra-pricey weapons from $790 billion to $1.6 trillion.

When pressed on why the massive weapons arsenal we already possess, which was credited with intimidating the Soviet Union into surrender, isn’t sufficient to keep the peace in a suddenly unipolar world, defense hawks sometimes cite what they claim is an emerging threat from China. “The Chinese are designing new classes of submarines with increased capabilities,” said Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.). “If we do not move to produce two submarines a year as soon as possible, we are in serious danger of falling behind.”

That is nonsense. China is not even a serious regional power, as the Pentagon’s 2007 report to Congress makes clear: “The intelligence community estimates China will take until the end of this decade or later to produce a modern force capable of defeating a moderate-size adversary.” The report noted that “China’s military is focused on assuring the capability to prevent Taiwan independence,” but this last week the military threat to Taiwan gave way to a historic peace opening, with the first visit by the head of Taiwan’s ruling party to the mainland since the 1949 revolution.

Oh, and here’s another thing. Those Virginia-class submarines that Lieberman says are so important to our national security and for which he lobbied so hard? General Dynamics’ Electric Boat Co. has received multibillion-dollar contracts to build them. The company is based in Connecticut, suggesting that the real goal here was to find an enemy—any enemy—that would justify spending U.S. tax dollars on weapons produced in his home state.

Since the 9/11 attacks, the United States has been on a madcap spending spree on wars and weapons having little, if anything, to do with combating terrorism, nothing to do with the imaginary threat from China and everything to do with sustaining an enormously bloated defense industry threatened with extinction because of the demise of the communist enemy. The fact is, the end of the Cold War was a welcome development for everyone except for those in the military-industrial complex whose profits and jobs, as President Eisenhower famously warned, are rooted in every congressional district.

As President George H.W. Bush noted in his 1992 State of the Union address, “communism died this year,” and, he promised, “we can stop making the sacrifices we had to make when we had an avowed enemy that was a superpower. Now we can look homeward even more and set right what needs to be set right.” Toward that end, he ordered his secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney, to initiate a 30% cut in defense spending. Gloom and doom in the military-industrial complex was palpable.

But then came what defense industry lobbyists and their many allies on both sides of the aisle in Congress came to treat as the gift of 9/11, offering dramatic imagery of a new global enemy. Fortunately for those who profit from a permanent war economy, few in government or the media were inclined to challenge the enemy bait-and-switch game that unfolded. The defense industry and the Pentagon bureaucracy that services it were all too happy to accept whatever war they could embrace, even if the new “global war on terrorism” that President George W. Bush launched was to be fought against an enemy armed primarily with weapons that could be purchased for a few dollars at Home Depot.

The Soviets had developed the most modern arsenals, and the 9/11 hijackers were armed with box cutters, so how could we justify spending more to defeat al-Qaida than we ever did to combat the communist enemy? That is the third-rail issue that politicians and the media dread touching because of the national security hysteria generated after the 9/11 attacks. Yet no presidential candidate can be serious about cutting the federal debt, improving education, holding down taxes or paying for any of the other things that the candidates of both parties promise without cutting military spending.

Without slashing the inflated military budget, the next president, who will inherit at least a $400-billion current-accounts deficit along with debt service on seven years of profligate military spending, will not be able to finance any of the domestic reforms that both the surviving Republican candidate and his two Democratic opponents advocate.

Maybe one can make a case that it is appropriate that more than half of the discretionary funds in the 2009 budget go to defense, and all the other federal programs for science, education, infrastructure, global warming and nonmilitary international programs compete for the rest. But isn’t it bizarre that the biggest peacetime military budget in U.S. history—35% higher than when Bush came into office and larger than the military budgets of all other nations combined—is not even discussed in the current presidential contest?

That is because politicians from both parties are complicit in the waste of taxpayer dollars on weapons systems that deliver jobs to their home districts and profits to their defense industry campaign contributors. It is a disease of our political system predicted by two of our great wartime generals-turned-president. First was George Washington, warning in his farewell address that once a nation embarks on the path of imperial adventure, the irrationality of false patriotic appeals would trump reason. What better time to recall Washington’s historic caution to the nation “to guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism.”

In Eisenhower’s farewell address, he warned that “in the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

There is no better evidence of the prescience of Washington and Eisenhower than the fact that the most obscenely bloated military budget in U.S. history is not an issue in the current presidential campaign. Sadly, defense spending has become enshrined in our political system as a totem to be worshiped rather than a policy program to be critically examined.

Robert Scheer is the author, most recently, of ”The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America,” to be published this week by Twelve Books.
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[Saundra Hummer]

. ^^^Tutu's Trip
to
Gaza Censored by the US Media
By
Mike Whitney

“There can be no justice, no peace, no stability, not for Israel, not for the Palestinians, without accountability for human rights violations." Archbishop Desmond Tutu

01/06/08 "ICH" -- - Why was Desmond Tutu's trip to Gaza censored by the US media?

When Nobel Laureate and world renowned peacemaker Desmond Tutu goes to Gaza to visit the site of an Israeli massacre; that's news, right? So why is it impossible to find any account of his trip in America's leading newspapers? Is it because any information that is incompatible with the territorial ambitions of the Israeli leadership is simply “disappeared” into the media-ether?

Archbishop Tutu was a leader in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. He is neaither a terrorist nor an anti-Semite. His work as a human rights activist spans 4 decades. Like former president Jimmy Carter he was shunned by the Israeli government and refused entry into Gaza.

Why?
Two days earlier author and university professor Norman Finkelstein was refused entry into Israel even though he's Jewish and had parents who survived the Holocaust. Isn't that enough to gain entry or must one accept the prevailing doctrine of the far-right extremists in the Olmert government who think that it's okay to deprive Palestinians of their rights whenever they see fit?

Bishop Tutu had to go through Eqypt to get to Beit Hanoun; the town where 18 members of the al-Athamna family--including 14 women and children--were killed by Israeli artillery fire in November 2006. Tutu said that hearing "from the survivors of the massacre" had left him in a "state of shock".

Christine Chinkin, professor of international law at the London School of Economics, told the UK Guardian that her preliminary assessment of the attack was that it was a breach of international law.

"Firing in a way that cannot distinguish between civilians and combatants is clearly a violation of international humanitarian law," she said. "I don't think that the idea of a technical mistake takes away from the initial responsibility of the action of firing where civilian casualties are clearly foreseeable ... it has to be foreseeable when you give yourself such a small margin that any error has the potential to lead to civilian casualties." (UK Guardian)

Chinkin is right, of course. It was a massacre and should be thoroughly investigated by the international community. The responsible parties need to be held accountable.

According to the UK Telegraph, “No soldiers were ever charged in connection with the incident. Israel blocked attempts by the UN's Human Rights Council to investigate the shelling, saying that members of the body were "biased".

So now the members of the UN's Human Rights Council can't be trusted either?!?

Tutu ended his three day mission by calling for an end to the blockade of food, medical supplies and economic assistance to the Gaza Strip and by condemning the “culture of impunity” in which one nation arbitrarily imprisons one and a half million civilians who are left to languish in abject poverty and hopelessness.

"We saw a forlorn, deserted, desolate and eerie place," Tutu said "The entire situation is abominable. We believe that ordinary Israeli citizens would not support this blockade, this siege, if they knew what it really meant to ordinary people like themselves."

Tutu is right. This is not the work of the Israeli public, which (according to a recent poll in the Jewish newspaper Ha'aretz) 65% want direct negotiations with Hamas. This is the work of fanatics at the top-rung of the political system who—much like the Bush administration---operate without any regard for the will their people and without any concern about the vast human suffering they are creating.

Tutu met with the Palestinian prime minister Ismail Haniyeh on Tuesday and told him that, while he was opposed to the Israeli occupation, he condemned the rocket fire by militants into Gaza.

"True security, peace, will not come from the barrel of a gun," he said. "It will come through negotiation; negotiation not with your friends, peace can come only when enemies sit down and talk. It happened in South Africa. It has happened more recently in Northern Ireland. It will happen here too."
(UK Guardian)

Tutu went to Gaza for peace and not one newspaper in the United States covered the story. Apparently, the "culture of impunity" extends to America's media as well as the Israeli leaders who killed the 18 Palestinians at Beit Hanoun.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info
^^^^^^^

[playground]

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:: :: ::
[INDENT][SIZE="5"]'Iraq Troop Pullout Would Harm Israel'
By
JPOST.COM STAFF

.[FONT="Arial Black"]* * * * *
[INDENT][SIZE="6"]And The Winner Is
...
The Israel lobby
By
Pepe Escobar


(damn girl! your shit is hard to edit :gavel: :eek: :laugh: :wink2: )




thanks for putting those up Saundra. i remember when that Mearsheimer (sp?) book came out about a year back. i wanted to get it but i never got around to it.


i've just started this a couple days ago:

http://images.amazon.com/images/P/1859845177.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg


Apparently you can read it (the whole thing?!) here:

Politicide (http://books.google.com/books?id=TE8oCW2J2F4C&dq=politicide&pg=PP1&ots=_2YtOj4gVJ&sig=2YOyBgl6R6LnU2P6pNmqOqsUxGw&hl=en&prev=http://www.google.com/search%3Fhl%3Den%26q%3Dpoliticide&sa=X&oi=print&ct=title&cad=one-book-with-thumbnail)



i'm going to my nephew's Bar Mitzvah this weekend. i'll likely be keeping my reading habits to myself for a few days... :angel


edit: and another one:

.[FONT="Arial Black"] ^^^[FONT="Times New Roman"][SIZE="6"]Tutu's Trip
to
Gaza Censored by the US Media
By
Mike Whitney

[I]“There can be no justice, no peace, no stability, not for Israel, not for the Palestinians, without accountability for human rights violations." Archbishop Desmond Tutu

01/06/08 "ICH" -- - Why was Desmond Tutu's trip to Gaza censored by the US media?


thanks again. i print these out and read them on my bus commute to and from work. it makes the bus even more useful than it already is...

[Saundra Hummer]

(damn girl! your shit is hard to edit :gavel: :eek: :laugh: :wink2: )




thanks for putting those up Saundra. i remember when that Mearsheimer (sp?) book came out about a year back. i wanted to get it but i never got around to it.


i've just started this a couple days ago:

http://images.amazon.com/images/P/1859845177.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg


Apparently you can read it (the whole thing?!) here:

Politicide (http://books.google.com/books?id=TE8oCW2J2F4C&dq=politicide&pg=PP1&ots=_2YtOj4gVJ&sig=2YOyBgl6R6LnU2P6pNmqOqsUxGw&hl=en&prev=http://www.google.com/search%3Fhl%3Den%26q%3Dpoliticide&sa=X&oi=print&ct=title&cad=one-book-with-thumbnail)



i'm going to my nephew's Bar Mitzvah this weekend. i'll likely be keeping my reading habits to myself for a few days... :angel


edit: and another one:




thanks again. i print these out and read them on my bus commute to and from work. it makes the bus even more useful than it already is...

Enjoy your family gathering.

Have you read the post I put up about oil tankers sitting off shore like they did during the oil crisis back in the 7O's? That was going on back then like they say is happening now, this according to reliable first hand sources. People we knew who had seen them and saw them unload when the crisis ended.

Tempers were so short during that time, so much so that you couldn't believe it. We sat in line and ran out of gas with only one more car ahead of us, we were in an old 57 Cadillac too heavy to push up the slight incline by ourselves, and no one was about to help us and not get the gas they needed. When we finally got up to the pump, the car in front of us was the last car to get any gas, the station ran out. So our car had to sit there for days until more gasoline could be delivered to the station. The station/market owner drove us the two miles home, thankfully.

Then there was gas being siphoned out of the fellows cars and trucks where Rich worked. Someone got to our gas there as well this is why we ran out the time I was telling you about. Rich had to get a jerry can and put what he could in our tank and then he headed for our gas station near our house. It was about 10 miles or so away. Every station we passed had the longest lines imaginable. So due to having our gas siphoned, we were in a fix. Three days work was missed as there was no gas to get there.

One fellow Rich worked with caught a guy stealing his gas for the second or third time, and just about beat him to death one night, that ended that going on in their parking lot. If the fellows working that night, the swing shift crew hadn't stopped him, he probably would have killed him.

It was that bad. When I say tempers were short, I kid you not. It was really bad. Wonder if it will get to that point again? I hope not.

[Saundra Hummer]

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* * * * * * *
Center for American Progress Action Fund

THE PROGRESS REPORT
June 3, 2008 by Faiz Shakir, Amanda Terkel, Satyam Khanna, Matt Corley, Ali Frick, and Benjamin Armbruster

IMMIGRATION
The Consequences Of Enforcement Without Reform

The public debate on immigration reform in the United States has tended to focus on a narrow set of factors: a porous border between the U.S. and Mexico, the large number of undocumented immigrants inside the United States, and the politics of comprehensive reform versus border security. Hidden beneath the surface of these debates, however, is a shadowy world of law enforcement mechanisms that not only exacerbate the immigration problem in the country, but also violate the due process and basic human rights of immigrants who get caught up in a "system of neglect" that can at times result in unnecessary death. These problems often begin at the front lines of enforcement. Last month, federal agents conducted the "biggest immigration raid in U.S. history" that nabbed nearly 400 workers at a meat-packing plant in Iowa. While most of the people arrested have been sentenced, "not one company official as yet faces any charges -- something critics say is typical of a federal government that is tough on employees but easy on owners." In fact, such raids tend to reinforce the Bush administration's public relations campaign designed to present the facade that "the federal government is cracking down on illegal immigration." As Frank Sharry, executive director of the immigration-reform group America's Voice, noted, "[T]hose who think enforcement is the answer can't seriously believe the 12 million to 20 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. can be arrested and deported."

OPERATION STREAMLINE: Last November, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said that "the days of treating employers who violate [immigration] laws by giving them the equivalent of a corporate parking ticket -- those days are gone. It's now felonies, jail time, fines, and forfeitures." But throughout 2007, just two percent of illegal immigration related arrests "involved criminal charges against those who hired the workers." In fact, the federal government's focus on employees rather than employers has "increased criminal prosecutions of immigration violators to record levels in part by filing minor charges against virtually every person caught illegally crossing some stretches of the U.S.-Mexico border." Piloted in 2005, "Operation Streamline," as the program is known, "requires that virtually everyone caught illegally crossing segments of the border be charged with at least a misdemeanor immigration count and jailed until they are brought to court and, if convicted, eventually deported." However, last February, Streamline cases outnumbered all other Department of Justice prosecutions combined. The program is "swamping federal courthouses" and "distorting the fun